Slouching Toward Urschleim

Further to Der Alte

2011-10-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

At birthday celebration on Saturday, with youngest great-granddaughter.

First dream

2011-10-02T18:04:00.000-07:00

This is the first I remember, probably from 1955 or 1956.

My mother takes my brother and me to a restaurant/cocktail lounge. She is dressed in a tweed suit (jacket and skirt) of a sort of blue-purple with yellow and black highlights., with a matching hat—more a beret, really. This is apparently during one of my mother’s blonde phases. The suit existed, BTW.

As children, we are not permitted in the bar/lounge. We are required to wait outside. Before we are removed from the premises I glance inside and see my mother at the bar sipping a drink from a straw in her distinctive tweed suit.

Richard and I (in the dream I seem much closer in age and ability to Richard) wait outside the tavern seated on the ground against a wooden packing crate painted in yellow. The crate in turn abuts the building. It is mid-day. We fall asleep.

We wake up. It is now late in the afternoon, and the sun is very low. We are still seated against the packing crate, but whereas this had formerly been up against the wall of the tavern, it is now ten feet away. We somehow never registered that movement.

I peer into the restaurant. Where formerly it had been bustling with patrons, the space is empty save for cobwebs. No one has been in this room for many years. There is no sign of our mother. Behind the bar—o, sweet Jesus!—an animate skeleton is mixing drinks, and at this point I wake up wailing and my parents depart the party-in-progress to quiet me down.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

2011-10-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

(Just at the moment, in the “Delta Club” at SFO)

Richard Careaga and I go back fifty-nine years. I was not paying complete attention for about the first thirty-six or forty months of this period, but from that time forward, and until he quit what remained of the ancestral hearth in September 1965, I studied him closely and attempted energetically if erratically to model my life on his. I was already on a skewed trajectory destined to bury the point in wilderness far removed from my intended target, but everything I am today is informed by the slavish adoration and emulation with which I regarded him from the earliest months during which my initial impressions coalesced into my first memories.

He would have been eight and change and I three and change. I was aware of my parents, but these then appeared vast, gigantic conditions of nature rather than actors within it. Richard loomed large enough to my toddler vantage, but still of sufficiently human scale to command my devotion rather than my uncomprehending love and awe. As I gradually developed a more nuanced comprehension of my family, Richard was my reliable guide and intermediary, explaining, intervening, protecting. He did all this even as he extended his own social circle to his peers. I vividly remember him cycling away from me in 1957 to join his friends. I was more than prepared to be party to that conversation; they, likely not so much. “Rich!” I screeched, “R-i-i-i-ch!” —and the bicycle with its rider disappeared at the western end of Index Street faster than my stubby little legs could carry me.

He’s always been the overachiever of the family (although he’d feel uncomfortable to hear himself so described) and his younger sibs stand in awe of him: spare us, Richard, the “impostor syndrome” bullshit. Noted and dismissed. He stayed here at the Crumbling Manse™ the past two evenings and even though his flight back to Florida does not leave until curfew this evening elected to head off to SFO in mid-afternoon. This seemed loopy to Lina, but I understood: it is better to be five hours early for a flight than one minute late. This is the Careaga Way, and I salute my bro (ensconced, I trust, in the fabulous premium appurtenances of the “Delta Club” from this moment until the boarding call) on his way back east.

Der Alte...

2011-09-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

Turns ninety today. Our relations have been, oh my, fraught for almost sixty years, but he is a survivor, an irascible survivor, and I pay tribute to my onlie living true begettor. He’s been one of life’s hungry men since his childhood: hungry for adventure, hungry for advancement, hungry for information, hungry for knowledge. The picture above was taken when he was about twenty, shortly after he joined the merchant marine to see the world. A few weeks later there was a dust-up at Pearl Harbor, and just a day before transfers out of the merchant marine were frozen for the duration he jumped to the Marine Corps, and stormed across the South Pacific from Guadalcanal until he very nearly perished in the course of the Guam landings in July 1944 (interestingly, among the Navy physicians waiting offshore was James V. McNulty, who was the attending OB/GYN in Los Angeles as I spilled into the world a little over eight years later).

Along with my mother, my dad passed along to all his children a love of reading that stood us in good stead as many of our cohort were hypnotized by TV. Because the 1950s middle class strove to improve itself (rather than racing, as the remains of that class appear to me in my own late middle age, to conform to a lewd, violent and vulgar popular culture), he subscribed to a series of classical music “great performances,” delivered by mail on LPs, and these formed, together with the Broadway musicals for which I’ve never lost a taste, and the “American songbook” standards I came subsequently to rediscover, the basis for my own musical re-education beginning in about 1972.

Our relations have been intermittently difficult over the years, and it is quite certain that neither of us will live long enough for a meeting of minds regarding the President (I’m fer; he’s agin) or half-term Governor Palin (he thinks she’s swell; I think she’s, well...). That doesn’t matter. I wish I’d understood years earlier the importance he places on his opinions eliciting respect (not necessarily actual agreement) from his children because they’re his opinions. I would not have persisted so loudly or so long in dissenting.

So, happy birthday, Dad. You’ve outlasted the rest of your initial family by decades, and I hope that you continue with all due vigor past the C-mark. You have passed on your insatiable intellectual curiosity demonstrably down two and likely three generations. Your sons and daughter will all gather this weekend at Sis’ house to lavish tribute upon you.

After seeing “Restrepo” last night...

2011-08-29T18:52:00.000-07:00

On the Atlantic site, regular contributor Jeffrey Goldberg posts this incontrovertible evidence of the wickedness of America’s foes in “The Real Meaning of 9/11.” Money quote:

Imagine, for a moment, you are Marwan al-Shehhi, the lead hijacker of Flight 175. You see Christine Hanson among the passengers on the plane you had just hijacked — a two-year-old child, seated on her father's lap — and you fly the plane carrying this child into the South Tower of the World Trade Center anyway.

A precious lisping little toddler, slain by a murderous Islamist who has determined to carry out an act of war (as Marwan al-Shehhi certainly perceived it—specialists in international law may certainly contend the question)…is that not just dreadful? And he actually might have seen her precious little pudgy cheeks, pictured above, and still gone ahead and killed scores of scores of innocents.

Christine Hanson’s face serves as well to represent the many hundreds of children done to death by American ordnance in Afghanistan and Iraq in the ten years since “Nine-Eleven.” They were as beloved by their parents; they deserved as little to die; they were wept over by their surviving kin; they were murdered as cold-bloodedly as Christine, little as our cheerleading polyester proletariat cares to acknowledge this.

As moral counterweight to the pitiless character of Marwan al-Shehhi we have Brad Broadshoulders, who pilots a Stealth bomber, Peter Pureheart, who controls a Predator drone from Langley, Steve Strongsinew, who programs cruise missiles, and Dirk Granite, who calls in airstrikes upon suspected Taliban positions in the Korangal Valley. Not a single one of these sterling characters has ever knowingly slain a toddler. But guess what: the toll of children killed by the 9/11 hijackers is negligible measured against the number exterminated or maimed by our brave technocrats during the past ten years, deaths that have sown dragons' seeds of bitter foes. Can anyone really imagine that, just because our side kills infants wholesale without actually seeing them first, we are somehow rendered more virtuous than the monsters who might have glimpsed the darling little visages of our wee bairn? Cripes.

Asymmetrical warfare always looks unfair to the side that has the cruise missiles.

This has long been a sore point with me, how the good old U S of A imagines that it can kill any number of children and noncombatants without any moral obloquy attending these murders because, of course, they’re merely collateral damage and not intended, and accordingly a hundred brown children killed by a cruise missile count as nothing beside the truncated life of an American infant vaporized by a bestial hijacker, which crime by contrast cries to heaven. Give me a fucking break.

Rocky the Dying Squirrel

2011-08-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

He has known sin at last, my gentle dog. Ravi has slain his first squirrel.

I had him at the corner park on Wednesday, and a squirrel that had been taunting him from relatively safe perches went scampering now and again dangerously close to the jaws of a dog who was feeling some rather primal impulses. At a certain point the creature scrambled up the trunk of a tall palm tree from the base of which Ravi has vainly attempted times past to reach scores of squirrels securely chattering indignation and abuse anywhere from six to thirty feet beyond his reach. He runs round and round the tree, frantic with bloodlust, and the squirrels dart down the trunk until they’re nearly within reach and then streak skyward to the fronds.

Late that afternoon, alas, the creature made an ill-judged attempt to quit the palm for another tree, and the moment the poor beastie hit the ground Ravi was on it like stupid on Sarah Palin, seizing it between his formidable jaws.

“NO!” I yelled, using my best Zeus-on-his-throne (and really pissed off) voice, and for a wonder this actually overrode about fifty million years of Canoidea evolution, the thin overlay of reflexive obedience imposed by just a few thousand years of Canis lupus familiaris genetics combining with the social conditioning to which our domestic dogs are subject sufficing to cause him to drop the doomed rodent from his mighty mandibles. The squirrel was stunned, no longer in a taunting mood, and Ravi, only momentarily ensorcelled by His Master’s Voice, lunged agin. “NO!!” I repeated, adding anabolic steroids, crystal meth, a Peet’s double espresso, 20 CCs of pharmaceutical epinephrine and a fifteen-hundred watt amplifier channeled through vintage “Voice of the Theatre” monitors the size of steamer trunks to the mix. He hesitated for long enough for the squirrel to scramble up the tree, where it was met, at about the 18-foot mark, by another squirrel that assaulted it cruelly and knocked it to the ground, a long fall. The poor creature was even more dazed this time, and Ravi, by this time berserk with bloodlust, lunged forward for the kill. I fear that even Master’s moral suasion, however loudly conveyed, might have fallen short of its desired effect at this point, and so had recourse to grimly seizing his sturdy collar, planting my heels in the sod and growling “This far and no farther” as my dog gave crazed way to the murderous impulses of his ancestors. The squirrel once more escaped to safer altitudes and was this time not assaulted by its fellow.

Alas, yesterday evening we returned to the scene of the crime to find a squirrel corpse lying by the base of the palm. I suspect that the first encounter, from which I thought my roared reprimand to have spared the creature’s life, may have proved fatal, possibly by means of internal injuries or bleeding, after all, although I'd prefer to imagine that it was the entire sum of its traumas, including the long fall administered by its fellow, that did it in. I regret the whole episode, while acknowledging that had Ravi killed a rat instead (we’ve had rat issues here in the Crumbling Manse now and again, and are notably unsentimental on the subject) I would likely have shrugged it off.

R seemed disappointed and puzzled all the way home on Wednesday that I had thwarted him just when victory and vermin were a crushing bite and a vigorous neck-snapping shake away. I stopped at the Food Hole en route and purchased him a quarter-pound of beef stir-fry which, stuffed into a “Kong,” went a long way toward distracting him from those fruitless speculations.

As it should be. They ask for so little.

Once more with beehives

2011-08-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

I reprint “Frances Among the Beehives: A Birthday Ode, 1980” to mark the birthday of my dearest friend. She lived, in those days, in Utah, a “black hat” among the “saints”:

Frances Fisher, drinking gin
and tonic as the Saints march in,
Waverly Fisher, whom Random knew when
Has turned twenty-nine. Rand starts over again,
Smites his forehead, pours a cup
Of Folgers hi-test, sobers up
Within another cup or two, or
(Muse invoked) another few,
Conveys from land of sin and surf
His greetings to Moroni’s turf,
Hopes Provo is pleasant, knows Mormons are not
All that bad save en masse
(but it’s en masse you’ve got—
Utah being the homeland of Wog and of Polly,
Salt Lake, Brigham Young and the Osmonds, by golly!).
This doggerel is pretty poor
Imitation Clement Moore
Which is, however, no excuse
Not to play it fast and loose
On Frances Fisher’s natal day.
Sin! Debauch! And by the way
Do not let Sainthood take its toll
On Franny’s hedonistic soul.
In Rome we do as Romans do
But are, in Zion, careful to
Stay decadent. Remain alert!
Party, drink, and don’t convert.
Cheek by jowl with Latter-Dates
Black hats discreetly congregate,
and slipping from the pious’ sight
Go Gentile into that good night.

Karma is a bitch, is it not?

2011-08-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

A US Chinook helicopter transport was shot down in Afghanistan a few days ago with the loss of thirty US military personnel and seven Afghans. Much has been made of this, and in particular a poignant plea on behalf of his dead father from Braydon Nichols, a Kansas City ten year-old, has been widely circulated on the internet.

It is difficult to remain unmoved reading or viewing these accounts. I can’t. My own father, who will turn ninety next month, is a US Marine veteran of the South Pacific war. He fought on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, and came literally within an inch of losing his life while storming the beach at Guam eight years before I was born. Had he died in action, I would obviously not have an opinion on the subject. Had he died when I was ten, I would have been crazed with sorrow. I do not intend anything that follows to suggest that I deprecate Braydon Nichols’ grief.

May we step away, however, from Kansas City and 2011, to a hypothetical grieving family half a world away and a quarter of a century ago? As Braydon Nichols is bereaved today, so must Vitaly Chernakov have grieved in 1986 when he learned that the Soviet “Hind” helicopter transport his father piloted had been downed with the loss of all hands by Islamic fundamentalist insurgents armed by the United States. The Chernakovs would have been assured by Russian military representatives, as the Nichols have been by ours, that the husband/father died for a good cause. Both families, I daresay, took as much comfort from these bromides as grieving survivors generally do.

As we wail and rend our garments over the Chinook downing, though, is it altogether inappropriate to note in passing that very few Americans could be found to weep over the deaths of hundreds of Soviets lost in helicopter transports downed by means of armaments thoughtfully provided to the heroic Afghan resistance by Our Tax Dollars at Work? On the contrary, every report of an episode like this was greeted on these shores with lusty huzzahs (heroic freedom fighters smite wicked foreign invader!) and nary a tear for the children and widows of the Russian troops.

And yet, and yet. What were the beastly Russians doing there? Spreading their filthy socialistic doctrines into helpless Afghanistan as the next step in their ruthless plan of world domination. What did the Soviet soldiers imagine they were doing there? Fighting bands of savage seventh-century fanatics consumed with a primitive and inhumane vision of Islamic fundamentalism. What did the Afghan resistance think it was doing? Driving out foreign invaders.

And what are we doing there today? Fuck if I know. What do we imagine we're doing? Fighting bands of savage seventh-century fanatics consumed with a primitive and inhumane vision of Islamic fundamentalism. What does the Afghan resistance think it is doing? Driving out foreign invaders.

Frankly, I think we owe the Russians an apology. We could start by respecting their example and quitting the “graveyard of empires” sooner rather than later. Throughout the entire 1980s every Soviet soldier or airman who died by force of arms provided to these same fundamentalist loonies was lustily cheered by the entire American consensus as a blow for freedom. You’ll look in vain in the reporting of the time for anything like the weeping and wailing this Chinook crash has entailed. If we want to express compassion for 10 year-old Braydon, this might be a good time to regret that out of sheer jingoism we were absolutely indifferent to 10 year-old Vitaly when his helicopter pilot father was killed by an American-supplied Stinger missile in 1986. In a world less ignoble than this one, we as a nation might be capable, looking back on our role in that stage of the conflict and comparing it to the present day, of feeling a twinge of…shame? Remorse? But no, that will never happen. We Americans are a simple, generous, impulsive, forgetful, heavily armed people. And the morning and the evening were the eleventh hour.

I’m sorry, Dave...

2011-03-05T19:31:00.001-08:00

but your services are no longer required by this mission.

The New York Times reports that the complex analyses formerly undertaken by cohorts of high-priced attorneys and legions of clerks and paralegals can now be assigned in large part to computer software. This suggests to me that Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity,” in the unlikely event it occurs as he envisions it, will have been preceded for some years by mass layoffs among the cognitive classes, who will doubtless be disappointed to learn that only our oligarchs will have the medical means and longevity to be transmuted into silicon.

Machine intelligence, and in particular machine “understanding” of human language, appears to have just lit up its afterburners during the past few years. I've long considered the “Turing Test” to have been a faulty threshold for assessing electronic sentience, and even if it weren’t, you can bet that the first time a galaxy of algorithms persuasively holds up its end of an informal and discursive conversation, the goalposts will be moved out to the parking lot. By decade’s end, though, we’re going to share the economy with a complex agglomeration of automated subroutines that will certainly appear to be sentient (should the actual condition be attained, the fact of it will likely be recognized only some time after it occurs), and this development will be, to say the least, fraught. What a pity it is to think that such fabulous power and potential will be wielded in the service of ever-more pitiless efficiencies on behalf of late-stage capitalism, the present-day inhumanity of which scarcely stands in need of such literal augmentation...

Nunc dimmitis

2011-02-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

God, he had the softest ears. Like velvet.

He is gone, Napalm the Wonder Dog, done to death on Friday night by the injection of a lethal drug directly into his heart. He was eighteen years old, give or take a month, and his health had been dicey since the beginning of 2009. Left behind are grieving owners, a score of concerned friends, and three thoroughly mystified and troubled canine pals: Ebony and Connie, of Oakland’s fashionable Rockridge district, and housemate Ravi, who watched his chum being trundled away in a plastic container, chief among these.

Napalm had gradually become so frail during his last eighteen months that one strained to remember what an energetic and adventurous creature he was for most of his life. He adopted Lina back when she was a freshly-minted J.D. by the simple expedient of homesteading the porch of her Glendale bungalow. Investigation revealed that he’d earlier been taken up (and then subject to parental veto) by a latino child in the neighborhood who had christened the dog “Negro.” A highly abbreviated field test suggested that there were very real practical obstacles to the use of this name as a means of summoning the dog in any given public space, and so Lina settled upon “Napalm” as sharing with the Spanish name the initial consonant, stress, vowel sound and two-syllable structure. Also, his frisky digging and pissing in her garden brought to mind the effects of American chemical warfare on Vietnamese foliage, and “Napalm” and “Agent Orange” were often associated with that particular salient of America’s ongoing struggle to make Asia safe for its imperial hegemony.

Napalm was about thirty months old when I first made his acquaintance, and had probably passed his third birthday when he and Lina and I formed a household at the unlamented “Locksley Hovel” in April 1996. He was young and frisky. He regarded me at first with polite suspicion, but shortly came to acknowledge me as vice-president of the pack when Lina was present (chopped liver when she was not).

A few things I remember about him: He loved Lina’s games, in particular “Chewy Shoes” and “Monster Dog.” In “Chewy Shoes” Lina would extend her legs and clap her shod feet together, and Napalm would growl dramatically and pretend to bite the shoes—always play bites. “Monster Dog” involved her shouting "You’re a monster dog!” and running at him, whereupon, on the present premises, the two of them would chase one another around the central axis of the house, with the polarities of pursuer and pursued spontaneously and unexpectedly transposing. A splendid and breathless time was had by all.

He had a dog’s love of ritual and routine, and deep dogly suspicion of deviations from routine. In the latter 1990s we took him to the Yuba River, and he did not approve of our splashing around in the swimming hole, no, not even a little bit. At one point he ventured onto a flat but sloping riverside rock to bark his disapproval. The rock was slick with algae, and he fell into the water. There was a moment of sheer evident panic before he realized that...he could swim, whereupon panic morphed instantly into pride: I'm a swimming dog! From that moment forward, and for almost the rest of his life, if there was standing or running water available he would eagerly venture into it. Some years back, when he was still sufficiently vigorous to accompany us on mountain biking trips to Moab and environs—he could still run for miles eight years ago, given sufficient hydration and a rational schedule of rest stops in the shade—we purchased a doggie life vest for him (required by some federal agency or another as a condition of taking him to the river), and he appreciated this augmented buoyancy in later years.

In his prime he loved to run, and would play “body slam” with the other dogs at Point Isabel, the glorious off-leash dog park in nearby Richmond. In late middle age, before the onset of the gradually accumulating infirmities that finally did him in, he left off such rough trade, but was still good for a romp and a growl with his circle of doggie friends. I should mention that two of these, Hector (“Hector the Corrector”) and Quino, predeceased him, Hector a decade ago and Quino unexpectedly just last year.

Lina reminds me that back when he could still tolerate Milk Bones™, we would sometimes leave him one of these as a consolation prize if we had to venture out of the house without him. He would sit in the vestibule holding the treat between his paws, and there he would be two or three hours later upon our return, with the MB still held before him, visibly licked over but otherwise intact, and only then would he gratefully commence gnawing upon it.

One of the first symptoms of Napalm’s decline was a case of "idiopathic canine vestibular disorder,” which is vetspeak for “your elderly dog is very dizzy and we don’t know what causes this, but it will get better soon.” He was pretty good for a year after that, and then a collection of ailments and debilities began to snowball until we finally concluded on Thursday night—he could no longer rise to his feet unassisted, and cried throughout the night as he soiled himself repeatedly—that the dog wasn’t having fun anymore. Nor were we by that time, and we agonized as to whether we were projecting our comfort and convenience onto his fate.

In the event, we summoned Doctor Dogvorkian, who came to the premises last night to usher Napalm out of his pain. N had a last afternoon walk on the grassy premises of the middle school across the street, and savored the unspeakable smells that dogs so enjoy. I fed him a couple of “Happy Hips” chicken jerky strips, a favorite treat times past that his dodgy digestion had not reliably tolerated these latter years, and he seemed delighted at the old vivid taste. Dr. D then administered a sedative via needle to the thigh—Napalm growled softly, but Napalm always growled at shots—and then slowly faded out of doggie consciousness as Lina cradled his head in her lap. After ten minutes Dr. D injected the endgame into Napalm’s heart. N’s breathing, which up until this point had been almost unnoticeable, became audibly labored for one...two...three cycles

and ceased.

I had thought myself prepared for this. I was not. The grief was sharp, overwhelming. Farewell, you poor old creature.

Ravi was not there for the end, but was on hand for the transfer of Napalm’s body from his pillow into a plastic crate for transport off the premises. He appeared subdued this morning.

Top: Napalm in happier days at Navajo Lake, Utah, in 2000. Elevation was 10K feet, and he handled it much better than did his owners. Below that: Napalm near the end of his long life.

Another damn dog post

2011-02-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

A change, at least, from mooning over the Lost Girls. Here once again is Ravi, among the five or six of the World’s Best Dogs, at the rather grim “Hardy Dog Park” in Oakland’s fashionable Rockridge district. A passerby snapped him there a couple of Sundays ago, and kindly forwarded the digital image. Canines are on the mind because I have lately read of this appalling slaughter of sled dogs in Canada, which has set me to reflecting on the long partnership between our two great species.

Humanity and Canis lupus familiaris came to an arrangement a long time ago, the terms of which are heavily weighted in favor of the primate party. The more time I spend around dogs, the more impressed I am that they consent to the partnership. If the other animals with whom we share this planet could be raised to a level of abstraction that would permit them to grasp the concept of “evil,” and to assign a form factor thereunto, humans would embody that satanic slot. And yet, dogs, those ever-hopeful collaborators, like us. We would be a much lonelier species without them.

Doppelgänger

2011-01-22T19:41:00.000-08:00

National Geographic discovered this one (on the right) at some point during the past few years. The resemblance to a lost one is...spooky.

Like tears in rain

2010-11-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

One more anniversary this evening, forty years ago; another tomorrow, thirty-eight. Neither co-principal will remember either occasion, the one being indifferent and the other deceased. “All these moments will be lost in time…”

34 years ago

2010-11-20T20:04:00.000-08:00

I suspect that the other principal has put the entire occasion out of her mind.

Noted (almost) without comment

2010-07-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

The picture comes from “Hyperbole and a Half,” which I bookmarked half a minute after seeing this.

Fraught anniversary

2010-07-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

(reposted from the original blog half a decade back)

On this date many years ago, a Saturday, it was, I flickered into consciousness from sleep as—ah, Nabokov described it in a similar context in Ada—“the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.” I woke up, entwined and ungarbed, with a young woman whom I’d been stalking (as she would likely put it today) for over a quarter of my young life. I don’t think that the morning assembly of reality has ever rocketed up such a vertical gradient of joy, and I’m astonished looking back that my nose didn’t bleed. It all ended badly about a dozen years later, and while I don’t hold any truck with astrology (we Leos aren’t that credulous), I have to scratch my head at the thought that this radiant morning was also G.W. Bush’s twenty-eighth birthday. Clearly doom and grief were in the air, all unnoticed then...

I long ago understood that not all of my fellows maintained the equivalent of my conscientious internal calendar. I'd get amused responses in high school upon innocently observing “You know, it’s just two years ago today that...” I'm going to guess that the young woman in my account, for all the intense history we shared for a dozen years after that morning, has not summoned forth the event on this distant anniversary.

It could be verse

2010-07-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Sorting through my old papers I came across the above bit of doggerel. In the 1970s, in another life, Richard McCloud and I, and our then-wives, socialized rather frequently. Alas, I haven't seen any of the other three this century. McCloud was a sailor by profession and by avocation, and in 1979 purchased Tyche (named for the minor Greek deity of luck), on whom the four of us and sundry others passed many a splendid afternoon on San Francisco Bay. On the occasion of that purchase I penned the above lines, mimicking in my typographical treatment (to the extent this was possible given the technological resources of the day, which is to say, not much) the conventions of those Georgian poets who, when they made a classical allusion, wanted to make damn sure that their audience didn't imagine that they, the poets, were products of, you know, the XVIII Century equivalent of a red-brick university.

This comes from a brief period during which the Muse of Light Verse settled on my shoulder. I remain rather proud of it.

Raymond Loewy eat your heart out

2010-06-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

...or accept this tribute.

A labor of love: one Norman Timbs created this magnificent creature around a 1948 Buick V8 engine. The carcass was discovered in the Southern California desert eight years ago, purchased for a song and then lovingly restored. Source page here. Heartbreaking pictures of its low ebb here.

The light of this and other days

2010-06-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

For about as far back as the writ of memory reliably runs—in my case probably late in 1956—I have felt myself oppressed by the light of mid-morning, which first burned my emotional emulsions in the parched LA suburbs of my early childhood. For quite as long, I have basked and gloried in the slanted sunlight of late afternoon. I thought of this today as I strolled to the corner store (a 55,000 square foot Whole Foods Market on the edge of downtown Oakland, lest anyone imagine I'm speaking of a tiny mom&pop grocer) in the golden rays of a Northern California early summer.

Through my undergraduate years autumn was my favorite season, but in the years since, as the brute requirements of earning a livelihood have kept me indoors for most of the daylight hours, my preference has shifted toward summer, and Daylight Savings Time: I adore the illusion of a life after work. Since the beginning of the last decade I note a shift in my emotional response to the solstice from "Hot damn! Summer again!" to a pensive "I wonder how many more of these are left in the jar?"

It's good to be alive this late afternoon.

Regarding Helen Thomas

2010-06-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

She puts me in mind of Jimmy the Greek, back in the day. Particularly given that few present-day Israelis are of direct German or Polish origin, the notion that they should clear out and "go back" to those countries, from which such remnants of an earlier Jewish generation as survived the sieve of the Third Reich were justly grateful to flee, shows at best a tone-deafness to these historical sensibilities. And yet, and yet. Would Helen Thomas have entered retirement so abruptly had she weighed in on some different territorial/irredentist conflict elsewhere abroad?

The Kurds, for example: "Why don't the Kurds clear out of Turkey and move back to Iraq/Iran?" (Note that this game can be played with three corners)

The Tamils: "Can't they realize that Sri Lanka will never accept them? Why can't they just rejoin their fellow Hindus on the mainland?" (Alternatively: "The Sinhalese should just clear out and move down to southeast Asia with their fellow Buddhists.")

Or the Uighurs: "Surely these people can understand that they were never a logical fit with the Han Chinese. Why don't they just clear out and go live with the other Muslim camel-jockeys west of the Celestial Kingdom?"

See what I mean? Pretty darned offensive formulations, all of these, and any one of them might even have rated a public apology (although I doubt whether the Tamils have that kind of clout, and as for the Uighurs, the Cheney Shogunate demonstrated that these are to be shat upon with impunity). But Israel, plucky, thuggish little Israel, proves to be the third rail of foreign policy commentary.

I do not wish Israel ill, but I also do not wish it well in the sense that I am indifferent to its fate. I do not care whether the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka fails or prospers, and this indifference will not be taken by those who know me as a vile bias against the Tamils. An independent state for the Kurds carved out of Iraq, Iran and Turkey? OK by me. No state for the Kurds? Nichto problemo, and I trust that this will not be construed as Kurd-hatred. Autonomy for the Uighurs? I'm sure they care. I don't. A Jewish state in land also claimed as "Palestine?" Good luck with that, but no, I'm not prepared to subscribe.

Fortunately I'm not an elderly lady journalist who doesn't understand YouTube, and I suspect that HT ought to have retired some years back. I regret, though, that she had to go out on this particular banana peel. She deserved better. Israel, based on its conduct in recent years, deserves less.

Endorsed without comment

2010-06-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

“Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as the are. They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence or scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressible, good-humored, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them.”

—Tom Stoppard

Incident on a Baghdad Street

2010-04-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

Three years past, but still sickening. If you have eighteen minutes and a tolerance for the banality of evil, here's the video:

Over on John Cole's site someone posted a response to the effect that requiring our Teeming Millions to sit through the footage might have a salutary effect, rather like having the local Germans marched through their friendly neighborhood extermination camps in 1945. Alas, I fear a significant fraction would simply giggle like our Brave Boys in their helicopter watching one of the wounded photographers attempting to crawl off the street ("C'mon...reach for a weapon...just try it!"). They didn't finally kill the photog until someone arrived in a van and had the effrontery to pick him up.

This is, mutatis mutandis, indistinguishable from sundry atrocities committed in Russia by the Beastly Hun during the late unpleasantness of the 1940s. The figures on the Baghdad street were, plain and simple, untermenschen, negligible existences to be erased as casually, and with as much satisfaction, as you or I might squash a buzzing fly. Some will say "Hey, this is war." In that case, I respond that we ought to shrug and respond "it's just war" when the charbroiled corpses of US troops—or contract killers—are displayed hanging from bridges.

A number of the US deaths in Iraq have been consequence of helicopters shot out of the air. If this crew had been among them, who among you is so wed to tribal loyalties that you would not agree that a rough justice was served?

I could almost see voting for Palin in 2012 on the grounds that this sorry ratfucking excuse for a republic, this savage, smirking, predatory empire deserves her. Bring on the Rapture, motherfuckers!

Auld lang syne

2010-01-03T22:18:00.000-08:00

As I wrote to another friend recently, one's fifty-eighth year is a little late in the day to await the flowering of genius, and a sensible fallback position would accordingly seem to be to cultivate friendships, family ties and a rich interior life. It was in this spirit that I looked forward to yesterday's reunion with vertical-market composer Carl Stone, who never knows which of four cities (Tokyo, Nagoya, Los Angeles or San Francisco) to pine for as the work of an itinerant musician draws him hither and thither around the four cornerth of the globe, and Alison Fleck, Benicia-based landscape designer, who tends her own garden whenever she can spare a moment from creating grottoes, vistas, terraces and bowers for the privileged classes of the greater San Francisco Bay Area. I, of course, do no useful work whatsoever outside the specialized precincts of BrainDead Systems (formerly Comatose, Somnolent, Torpor and Drowse, LLP), my employer since Hector was a pup.

I've known Carl for 47 years now; Alison for 41 and change. Alison and Carl probably met in 1965 or 1966 at Oakwood, a tony SoCal private school. We three have remained in tenuous contact over the years, the last reunion of the threesome being at the Crumbling Manse™ back in 2001. Saturday's reunion, which took advantage of Carl's swing through the Bay Area at the turning of the year, had us meeting at Alison's Benicia spread, in the hydrocarbon shadow of one of the region's many carcinogen-belching petroleum refineries, whence we sped away in Carl's trusty Saturn to lunch in a chi-chi Yountville beanery, where we three dined for a sum that could likely keep a blue-collar family of eight in TV dinners for a month (remind me to remind the proletariat, come the revolution, that we were rooting for them all along) before barely making the "Carols in the Caves" performance at the Clos Pegase winery outside of Calistoga. Our party's response was mixed. Carl, as a professional, took technical exceptions to certain particulars in the performance. I found it a trifle new-agey; Alison thought the lip-service to Christian themes too much lip and not enough sacrilege. I think, though, that on balance we three enjoyed ourselves in a sneering, condescending sort of way (as I remarked to Carl afterward, while I missed my chance to see the Last Supper sculpted in butter the last time I drove through the midwest in 1991, I have at least sat through "Carols in the Caves"). Actually, I give high marks to anyone who makes his living as a freelance entertainer, and give "Improvisator" David Auerbach bonus points for showmanship and and a decent level of competence with, if not in every instance actual mastery of, the "fifty rare instruments" he has taught himself to play.

It was good to catch up with Alison and Carl. I'm always suspicious when people make extravagant claims for their friends (the subtext in each instance seems to be "and imagine how bitchin' I must be to hang out with such prodigies"), so I'll say merely that apart from their particular, distinctive and unique good qualities, my two chums have the superlative virtue of possessing a set of cultural and individual memories, tropisms and associations in common with Yours Truly, a rare distinction along this stretch of the descending arc of personal history. It was a treat to compare notes once again.

The nose knows

2009-12-09T17:35:00.000-08:00

The spousette was out of town this past weekend, and I was feeling at loose ends—OK, lonely—and called sundry chums on Friday in an attempt to set up a dinner party. In the event, only Mary and Eileen had a hole in their schedules, so we were just three on Saturday night, but a jolly trio we were. Napalm the Aged Wonder Dog (seventeen this winter) staggered out to the dining room to check out the guests and then wandered off to spend the rest of the evening in slumber. Ravi the Younger Wonder Dog, perfectly unaware that the day marked exactly one year since he'd landed this gig, posed for a wonderful photograph (above) by Mary Barnsdale, who has an almost preternatural knack for canine photography. I am pleased to post it for the three or four regular readers of this blog.

From “Zlateh the Goat”

2009-10-04T18:10:00.001-07:00

First seen hanging in College V "Old House" Room A447 (then hers; later mine; splendid chambers—never better, really) at this time 36 years ago; now handsomely framed on the walls of the Crumbling Manse™.

In praise of dogs

2009-10-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

They ask for so little, really.

Late this morning, as I was attempting to get some things done—well let's be honest, I was thinking about attempting to get things done in those moments I wasn't devoting to reading the political blogs—the dogs were pestering me, which I rather resented. "C'mon!" they were saying (I here essay a rather simple and un-nuanced translation from dogspeak to idiomatic English) "C'mon! It's a beautiful autumn day!" (It was: warm in the sunlight, crisp in the shade. Gorgeous. The Bay Area typically partakes of the Goldilocks' Porridge of North American weather on any given day of the year about three hundred samples out of 365.) "Let's go, let's get out, let's do something!"

I reluctantly put aside my preparations to "get some things done" and drove to the nearby "Linda Dog Park" in Piedmont, a nearby enclave of privilege and distinct municipality surrounded by some of the better districts of Oakland (who are nevertheless forbidden the privileges of Piedmont's separate school district, a policy, living as I do across the street from an Oakland middle school, I cannot bring myself to deplore). There the three of us—elderly Napalm, going on seventeen, and two year-old Ravi—passed the early afternoon from noon to 2:30 as an assortment of dogs and people transited the park. Napalm doesn't ask much of these excursions anymore: a rich assortment of olfactory signals along the main trail provided ample information for his leisured evaluation. Two year-old Ravi had over the course of our hundred and fifty minutes half a dozen playmates, including a couple who helped drain his batteries in games of chase/flee/posture all around the park.

We left shortly before noon and returned here, sundry additional errands run, by 3:30. Napalm sleeps, but at his age that's what he generally does of a given hour. Ravi, who was earlier bouncing off the walls, also slumbers, his batteries discharged for the nonce, in the safety of his "crate." Left to my own devices I would likely not have ventured outdoors for this splendid autumn day. I'm glad that the dogs drew me out. The "things to be done" can be done another time.

How it happens

2009-09-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

So a long-established rightie blog "Newsmax" runs this provocative little piece (reproduced courtesy of TPM) and then withdraws it, perhaps on the advice of counsel, saying "John Perry? Who? Never heard of him." Yeah, right.

The point is to infect the public discourse with this meme of domestic military intervention. This will shortly come to seem like a subject on which reasonable people might reasonably disagree. Do you doubt it? Reflect that at one time (in living memory!) torture seemed an unambiguous evil. The bad guys (the Nazis; assorted Southeast Asians north of armistice lines) did it and we didn't, and back in the day no one suggested that the line was blurry, or that there might be circumstances under which it was permitted to step across even a smudged boundary. Nope. But over the course of the Cheney Shogunate, our political discourse became debauched by degrees, advanced by just such initially outrageous salients, with evil increments creeping behind them. We may accordingly look forward to pieces in the Washington Post along the lines of "Military coups: Obviously not an optimal solution, but hasn't the Obama administration invited consideration of this option?" Then, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer: "Next up, Mark Shields and David Brooks on whether proponents of the armed overthrow of the Obama regime have been a little intemperate in their rhetoric, or whether a few leftist bloggers are just too thin-skinned." Just wait.

Another one over the side

2009-07-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

The Cronk. A shame he couldn't have made it just a few more days to the moon landing anniversary.

Niece blogging

2009-06-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

My youngest niece and I have just returned from a rather inefficient road trip that took us to Victoria BC and back. She made the ordeal a pleasure. The spousette and I promise that when next we conscript her for a vacation, it will be better planned.

Hell's Kitchen

2009-06-02T18:37:00.000-07:00

When we acquired the Crumbling Manse™ a decade ago we were pleased that most of its craftsman details had survived over the ninety years since the house went up as part of the post-earthquake building boom. The wainscoting and box beams and the pocket door in the front of the house were all intact, and had escaped the inexplicable vogue for painting these features over that had apparently seized the popular imagination at some point during the past century. All to the good. Toward the rear of the house it was a different story. There had been...questionable remodeling decisions made. We would explain to guests that clearly the kitchen had been reconfigured in the 1980s, and that the "Home Depot look" had been initially essayed, but that the option had ultimately been discarded as too pretentious and upscale. The kitchen, a large room, had been done up with the cheapest, shoddiest available counters and cabinets, sink and fixtures, and the feng shui was no great shakes.

The kitchen floor always felt a bit dicey in spots, as though it lacked the confidence that, for example, a sentient sidewalk might feel about its mission. It consisted largely of tiles, and many of these had cracked. Accordingly when the Life's Companion approached me ten days ago on this issue she had little difficulty securing my consent to rip up the shabby fractured old tiles and replace these with handsome new ones. Easy!

And ten days later I feel as though I've invaded the Soviet Union.

I had some initial concerns about the expense. These have been, ah, relegated. The dicey floor was scarcely there, so aged was the wood. The perimeter foundation at the rear of the house had some issues, and needed significant reinforcement. The shoddy cabinets had remained upright more out of respect for custom than from any structural integrity, and largely fell apart as they were moved. And you know what?

I'll pay anything. I just need the disruption to cease. I realize now that I'd be no good in a refugee camp.

Mary Barnsdale has a birthday

2009-02-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

We were briefly an item, back in the day. That it didn't work out was entirely due to my ongoing post-divorce nervous breakdown, which took the form of a sudden spasm of agoraphobia as the 1990s began. We have remained friends, and I've always looked back on our liaison as a providential meeting in exile of two citizens of a common country. My warmest wishes go out this evening...

This grand old man

2009-01-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

Raised in a semi-bookish household I was vaguely aware of John Updike (1932-2009) as a wunderkind of American letters long before I ever got around to reading him. As a snotty undergraduate in the early 1970s, knowing nothing more detailed about him than the lurid reputation he'd gained from the publication of Couples, I remember loftily disparaging him as a mere chronicler of suburban adultery. That was almost four decades ago: I began to discover, upon actually encountering his work in the short story collection Museums and Women, that he was a chronicler of genius, and I was subsequently to learn to my enduring sorrow that suburban adultery is a more piquant and, ah, fraught subject than I understood at twenty.

I wanted to write novels and stories myself, back in the day; a portion of talent and a vaster degree of discipline proved in the event to be wanting. It did not help that I'd accumulated some ruinous literary influences along the way--not themselves bad writers, but terrible mutagens, most of them, from the standpoint of a wannabee's embryonic DNA. Updike's influence was alone beneficent, and the only decent short story I ever wrote owed its closing cadences to a confluence of the final sentences of "The Taste of Metal" and "Your Lover Just Called" from Museums and Women:

He reached forward slowly, as underwater, and gently pulled the pencil from her hair. Rising with surprising speed she flowed into the embrace whispering indistinctly, please, please, eclipsed by kisses as he sought, still somewhat hesitantly, the softness of her small breasts. He wondered, as the narrow fissure of indecision closed, whether in the longer run of things he would credit this to volition or destiny, but in the longer run of things the distinction never matters; nor was it troubling him by the time there came again from the bedroom, in oddly muffled but imperative peals, the strident summons of the telephone.

From the late seventies forward I had a vague intention to drop a note to JU, merely a "well done." The notion flickered again early this year, but I imagined that I had another ten years at least to get around to it. As it turns out...not.

Tonight's assignment: read "The Happiest I've Been," which closes out Updike's first short story collection The Same Door.

Better late than never

2009-01-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

A roof over his woof

2008-12-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

Pictured above is "Ravi," rescued from the lethal chamber in Hollister CA early this month and at present being fostered here in the Crumbling Manse. He's eighteen months old, gangly, goofy and about a head taller than the incomparable Napalm, who's the senior dog on these premises. The original deal was that we would look after him for ten days, after which he would proceed either to another foster home or to a permanent gig. In exchange for taking him in fresh from his reprieve (rescue organization A plucked him from the pound in Hollister, eighty miles south of here, and handed him off to Berkeley-based rescue organization B via a veterinarian in nearby Fremont, a Bay Area locus of the Southwest Asian diaspora—hence his name, bestowed by the vet, a grandson of the Raj—where the contents of his scrotal sac were extracted and discarded, who then fobbed the creature off on us that afternoon) we have first refusal on that gig. Heaven help me, I think I'm going to say yes. I'm looking around me at possessions—books, DVDs, clothing—knowing that some of these will perish in the coming months in consequence of my softheartedness. I will be distraught, wroth. Will I benefit, I wonder, from remembering that I entered into this doggie pact with my eyes open?

Let me say at once that this is an adorable dog. His disposition is sociable, affectionate and curious; he is obviously intelligent; understands and complies with "NO!", albeit with a vanishingly brief retention. I can't believe that he's spent his life feral: he must have had a human family to be so well socialized. I surmise that the hypothetical family permitted him free run of their beds, sofas and chairs, a privilege he will not enjoy here in the Crumbling Manse. Napalm (also a "shepherd mix"; sixteen in March; remarkably healthy for a dog of his size) is concerned that his alpha status not be questioned, and does much posturing and snarling, to which the younger responds "Oh! The alpha male deigns to growl at me! I am not worthy!", conveyed with appropriately submissive body language and much tail wagging. Napalm appears gratified by this. Yesterday we took them both to "Point Isabel," the largest of the local off-leash parks, and Ravi behaved himself very well, never copping an attitude toward dogs or people. When a couple of other canines tried a brutal dominance routine on him, he did not respond in snarling kind but rather removed himself from the fray with an air of puzzled surprise.

When he reached us that first Friday, separated forever from his human family, fresh off a fortnight in the pound with some hardened characters, emasculated just hours earlier, a clown-cone affixed to he head and confined to a big plastic cage for transport, he was thoroughly traumatized and frantic. Sprung from the plastic cage he was so obviously distraught by the cone (intended to keep his wandering tongue away from those fresh stitches) that we defied the guidelines promulgated by rescue org B and discarded the device just five minutes in. I think we must have seemed to him the first human beings since Veterans' Day who'd done anything right, and that we secured, in that moment of his deepest doggie despair, almost inexhaustible moral credit for the remainder of our association.

There are issues. Abandonment issues. Separation anxiety. Ravi does not like being left alone, and sublimates this tension in...scientific investigation of his surroundings. His approach to the world around him, which he indulges when left unsupervised for even a short time, appears to be: 1) Is it edible? 1a) If yes, eat it. If no, might it be edible on the inside? 1b) Investigate with teeth. 1c) If inedible, destroy and discard; look around for another candidate to subject to the scientific method. 2) Rinse and repeat. Casualties of this approach thus far include two sets of wooden mini-blinds and two dog pillows.

And yet, and yet...A sweeter-tempered creature you could not ask for. Affectionate, attentive, eager to please and physically easy on the eyes. I fear that I've bonded (Lina, of course, was always in the can). He's here for as long as he wants to be.

How cool is that?

2008-11-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

I have not been as proud of my presidential vote since I cast it for the first time against Richard M. Nixon, whose toxic residues continue to sap and impurify our precious political fluids, on this night in 1972, and I'm far more pleased with the result this time out.

(The image is the work of NYC-based designer Marco Avedo, and reminds me of why it is that I'm an obscure in-house art director whose work (largely for in-house consumption) is routinely derivative. I wouldn't have come up with this in a year of trying. Avedo's original entry here.)

I saw the best minds of my generation...elsewhere

2008-10-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

Governor Sarah Heath Palin, concerned citizen:

Now, no one could have reasonably faulted her had she replied "Oh, ya know, that one a few years back where they said ya could lose yer home if, ya know, if the city wanted it for a shoppin' mall or somethin', you betcha!" without being able to identify it as Kelo v. City of New London. But it's quite clear from the embedded video that she was unable to think of a single case, and unwilling to acknowledge the fact. Instead she attempted to bluff her way past it.

I find this one point of common ground with many of her partisans: let Sarah be Sarah! Let her have "unfiltered" exposure to the Teeming Millions. For example, the CNN transcript of Thursday night's "debate" can be found here. Find the text string "Iran and Pakistan," and compare the candidates' responses on the issue. Biden doesn't do as well as he did addressing the same issue in one of the primary debates, but Palin is simply incoherent.

Plus, he has a young, charismatic heir apparent!

2008-09-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

Reply to interlocutors tired of "holding their noses"

2008-09-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

(originally posted on a discussion board; slightly revised for this blog)

...My, aren't we a couple of high-minded libertarian freethinkers, too fine-grained for the sordid political realities of this wicked world! "A" "tried that a couple of years back" and has "absolutely nothing to show for it so far" (o, the humanity!) and "B" is on his usual Noble Savage tear. Well, boo-fucking hoo. Ayup, I could get behind a candidate who never fudged, shaded or pandered on the campaign trail no matter how little his various audiences wanted to hear the unvarnished truth, and that might get me, and my hypothetical candidate, about a fortnight—if that—past the Iowa caucuses before he dropped out. "B" mentioned Khrushchev a couple of threads downstream (mangling the name, natch). Our younger participants will not remember, but Nikita Sergeyevich ramped down the level of oppression in the USSR an order of magnitude or two from Stalin's grim imperium. Life got a lot better there between 1949 and 1959, and this came about not because the Butcher of the Ukraine was a nice guy, but because he was, for the era, something like the best of all possible leaders, the nearest approximation to a decent human being in the Presidium who survived the literally murderous political ecosystem that surrounded Stalin. In Shrove's Amerika we content ourselves these latter years with mere character assassination, but the political process synthesized by a servile corporate press, a Beltway culture of snide courtiers masquerading as "pundits," and a voting populace largely debauched by soundbite coverage (including both outright knuckle-draggers and suburban naifs) is itself a pretty fucking harsh environment in which the pure of principle do not thrive, and certainly never survive for consideration on the first Tuesday in November.

Yeah, we all want a presidential candidate who opposes every federal policy, be it war or subsidy, that we dislike, and who promises to maintain or enhance every program of which we approve. We want him to nominate judges who will rule our way every time on issues concerning which we feel strongly. The good news is that this candidate exists. The bad news, my friends, is that this candidate is otherwise manifestly unqualified, for it is each and every one of us, a constituency of one. But let's return to the real world.

In the "real" world (assuming that this shoddy simulacrum of a century, so at odds with what we were all promised, can be dignified with that adjective) we live in a corporate-dominated duopoly that tolerates the franchise provided that the actual options are severely restricted. Unfair? Of course. Get over it, sports fans. Does this mean that the functional distance between the options is less than we might like it? Yes again. Suck it up. Are we therefore to conclude that the differences between the two candidates are immaterial, that the consequences of victory for the one would deviate from the consequences of victory for the other in negligible degree?

Bush v. Gore, motherfuckers. If you think we'd be in this fix today had organized partisan thuggery, media complicity and magisterial prejudice not contrived between them to fix the 2000 election, then just click away to another blog. Your money's no good here, as the unfriendly bartender says.

Election's coming up. The GOP was so damaged, its "base" so fragmented, its candidates so dreadful (Hillbilly Theocrat? Il Duce? Folksy Second Coming of the Gipper? Lunatic Libertarian? Magic Underwearian?), its record so utterly discreditable, that the "Maverick"—talk about living on capital!—was the last man standing. A rational electorate, weighing a rational discussion by actual "pundits," might conclude that the GOP standard-bearer sallied forth for consideration beneath an utterly discredited banner. Certainly his differences with his royal predecessor are slender. Surveillance, torture and "the surge"—hey, McCain's golden. His volatility, impulsiveness and gambler's temperament have all been amply documented, but he survived [something] at the hands of the North Vietnamese communists! He is a manly man! —and of course, "He's a man of conviction! He doesn't waffle! Once he makes a decision he sticks to it, even if events prove him utterly wrong—he'll never compromise his principles!"

Where have we heard that last bit before?

Obama is no one's perfect vehicle. I wish that he had stood firm on FISA, but he's running for president, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. I wish he'd set forth the grim and—largely thanks to the feckless actions of this regime—narrow options that the next administration faces, but I have a more nuanced (there: I've said it) view of these than does the Sarah Palin-besotted "hockey mom" imagined by the popular press.

What I propose to vote for is an obviously thoughtful and intelligent candidate, perhaps not ideally seasoned (seasoning isn't everything: look at Dick Cheney, with a distinguished executive résumé—his shogunate has been an utter clusterfuck) but clearly a quick study, a competent campaign field marshal and, looking back on the Democratic field, in retrospect the best choice, "choice" being here defined as the nexus between candidate chops and administrative potential. My candidate's opponent is an elderly man who has nakedly compromised most of his best-publicized previous "maverick" stances in order to make himself right with the theocratic faction of the GOP (today a criminal conspiracy masquerading as an American political party), and who was demonstrated with his choice of Sarah Palin a stark naked contempt for the office to which she might thereby be made eligible someday to ascend.

To those of you in deep "red" or "blue" states who might be inclined to abstain or to vote your simon-pure "conscience," for Nader or some other deluded enabler, I'd remind you that according to Newsweek's post-election account in 2000, a Bush campaign official cheerfully acknowledged that they'd thought that they might win the popular vote while losing in the Electoral College, and that in that event they'd planned to scream bloody murder and to challenge the legitimacy of Gore's election. In the event, of course, they turned effortlessly on that dime, as Republicans will, and they carried the day, to our and the world's cost. If you despise the party of authoritarian theocracy, and unless you are prepared to countenance its continued rule until your hypothetical perfect candidate is elected president, you should take your fingers out of your fucking nostrils, wipe them off, and vote for Obama, who will need both for the election and afterward as solid a mandate as he and we can get.

But if it's all about your rugged individualism and your preternaturally discriminating sense of smell—hey, go crazy. It's not like it'll be a long walk.

Johnny, we hardly knew ye

2008-08-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

I was not impressed with John Edwards' performance on the ticket four year ago, but late last year he was starting to win me over. The callow candidate of 04 appeared to have employed his down time to good effect, like a conscientious trial lawyer preparing for a court date. He seemed more thoughtful and more seasoned, and I thought I caught a whiff of RFK, another unpromising youngster who cleaned up better than expected. By the time of the California primary, though, he'd bailed, and I cast my vote for the Swarthy Guy.

We now learn that Edwards was going for the gold with an ingot of infidelity in his recent personal history — and what an infidelity! My stars and stripes, this man is within a year the near side of my own age, and a character like this doesn't cause his deeper reflexes to scream run away?

Regarding the actual morality of the thing I am, alas, unable to hold forth: in consequence of certain youthful sins and indiscretions the Special Subcommittee on Moral Abuses long ago banned me for life from participation in the Olympic stone-casting event, much as I'd love to play.

In a perfect world, or in a better world, at least, than this pellet of muck we are obliged to share with one another, the lapses of our candidates might be treated with the judicious perspective an anonymous Chicagoan brought to bear upon the news that 1884 presidential contender Grover Cleveland was implicated in an out-of-wedlock paternity scandal:

We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity but culpable in personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill, and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station he is admirably fitted to adorn.

Of course, Cleveland was a character of Cromwellian rectitude (lacking, thank God, the corresponding Cromwellian severity), and Edwards has shown himself...not so much. I do not fault him for lack of priapic self-restraint, but I take it very ill indeed that having let the Little Head lead the Big Head into realms forbidden to serious candidates ever since the Monkey Business business, he nevertheless partied as if it was 1968, and offered himself up as the standard-bearer for a cause far greater than himself, with the potential to put it at mortal peril. If this was done cold-bloodedly, then I cannot disparage his cynicism enough. If, as I am (perhaps charitably) slightly inclined to believe, he had contrived to persuade himself that the secret would not emerge, or that his candidacy could somehow survive it in a world in which Maureen Dowd is granted a column in the Paper of Record to vent her patented spinster's brew of the toxic and the trivial, then he is merely deluded rather than sociopathically selfish. Still, this remains a deal-breaker. I do not require that a president possess better-than average personal morals, but I do look for a better-than average resistance to self-deception. We have, after all, experimented with fantasy-based policymaking these ninety months past, and I trust that most of recognize how that has turned out.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Deborah Saunders avers that were she a Democrat she'd be "spittin' mad." Alas, on the evidence of her columns the past dozen years she's merely barking mad.

It is suggested that some in the Clinton camp now believe that but for Edwards' tainted candidacy the junior Senator from New York would have extinguished the flickering Obama campaign in Iowa. If this is true, then the former junior Senator from North Carolina should be entitled—not to the Justice Department, but to a parole from political limbo once a year on the anniversary of his providential interference.

Graphic design we can believe in

2008-07-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

This is by far the finest political poster produced on behalf of an American presidential candidate that I have seen in the 48 years since I first began to pay attention. And then there's...this.

V as Soviet poster girl

2008-02-24T14:52:00.000-08:00

I took this picture in April 1973 on the grounds of the University of California at Santa Cruz. It has always been one of my favorites among the (shockingly few) photos of her I possess. Remembering that time, I now think of a passage from Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim:

As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him on the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn't spontaneously intervene to prevent him...

Veronica

2008-02-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

She liked this poem, I remember, even though she disdained the George Kline translation:

Once more we're living by the bay,
and clouds of black smoke drift, daily, above us.
Our own Vesuvius has cleared its throat;
volcanic ash is settling in the side streets.
Our windowpanes have rattled to its roaring.
Some day we too will be shrouded with ashes.

And when that happens, at that awful moment,
I'd like to take a streetcar to the outskirts
of town and find your house;
and if, after a thousand years,
a swarm of scientists should come here
to dig our city out, I hope they'll find me,
cloaked with the ashes of our modern epoch,
and everlastingly within your arms.

—Joseph Brodsky

Heavy traffic

2008-01-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

I devised The Diebold Variations on a caffeinated whim 46 months ago, and was sufficiently pleased with them that I created a quick-and-dirty web page to share the conceit with a few friends. A couple of months later they came to the attention of Arianna Huffington, who plugged them in her blog, resulting in a surge of about 25,000 visits that June. Since then interest has risen and declined with the election cycles, but the general trend has been downward, with an average of 300 visits/month for most of the past year. This left me unprepared for a spike of just over 41,000 visits in the course of the twenty-four hours comprising last Wednesday. Criminentlies! Another increment of my fifteen minutes of fame! The good people at dotmac have already objected to my profligate use of their bandwidth.

I'm a little puzzled that the New Hampshire primary, fercrissake, appears to have been the occasion of the present kerfluffle. I'm actually an agnostic on the subject of e-vote fraud, having undertaken the project principally as a designer, and not as anyone who has meditated at length on, much less mastered, the technical impedimenta. Those of you craving red-meat analyses of the geek stuff should depart these precincts and head for Bev Harris' admirable Black Box Voting site. I do believe that instruments for committing vote fraud without undue effort either in the perpetration or the concealment ought not be left lying around where Karl Rove might find them, but when election fraud is the first conclusion arrived at by the losing side it creeps me out just a little bit.

The boy Kant help it

2007-12-10T17:18:00.000-08:00

Found on Crooked Timber, a Kant attack ad!

Urschleim reborn!

2007-12-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

I tried. Vishnu knows, I tried to make it work with "IBlog," the worthy offering from a little one-man software house in distant Hindustan, but at the end, and with this morning's, ah, fraught upgrade to the long-overdue v.2, I need to walk away from the crater and begin anew. So: same name, saner authoring environment, perhaps more frequent attention from its onlie true begetter. We'll have to see, won't we?