In case no one had noticed…

It became obvious that Monday night 33 years ago, to those who hadn’t quite picked up on the implications of Reagan’s election, that we were in for a rocky ride, a dark period of reaction against the progress of the previous two decades. We’ve never emerged, “hope and change” notwithstanding. I incline to think that none of us who remember the event will live to see the end of the tunnel.

Then again, we’re now halfway toward the Beatles reunion so many people yearned for in 1970.

On Veterans’ Day (formerly Armistice Day)

We celebrate the veterans of the armed services today for their willingness to “protect our freedoms.” The problem is, not a single round of American ammunition discharged in my lifetime, not a single bomb dropped, not a single splash of napalm, not a single cloud of defoliant, not a single cluster round—not a single one of the trillion+ dollars of kinetic or chemical rounds discharged since 1952 upon largely non-white foreigners has advanced the cause of American “freedom” by so much as a millimeter. On the contrary, each and every US adventure abroad has brought with it a contraction of domestic civil liberties. I have nothing against “our troops,” who believe in their cause as sincerely as the soldiers of another empire seventy years ago at this time (“Gott mit Uns” was the favored slogan back then, I believe), but I’m not prepared to assign to their depredations a noble cause. The most brutal and aggressive country on the face of the earth seventy years ago was...well, you know. Today, it's us.

Further to dog cognition

Comment would seem superfluous.

“The sombre imbecility of tyranny”

William T. Vollman's novel Europe Central impressed the hell out of me. It well deserved the National Book Award. Its author did not deserve over 700 pages of an FBI file compiled originally on the basis of a suspicion that he was the "Unabomber." Nor indeed, Ted Kaczynski having been identified and arrested by then, ought he have been investigated as the source of the 2001 anthrax attacks on the basis of his spurious identification as a "former suspect." Nor indeed is it proper that he has been detained on border crossings (seven hours seated. No reading permitted. Pee only under supervision) on the strength of his "suspect" status. This is how we live now. America is a police state. Honest, it is. This can happen to anyone.

(the tagline is from Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad)

Moloch, fuck yeah!

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Apropos of nothing in particular

I watched The Lives of Others again recently, and it held up very well indeed. For anyone who missed it on its previous theatrical and home video releases, the film is set in “East” Berlin (how archaic the distinction begins to sound!) in 1984, an odd choice of era in which to depict a surveillance-obsessed society.

Playwright Georg Dreyman, a cosseted darling of the German Democratic Republic, is so obviously a socialist believer that the regime has never troubled itself to monitor him until an influential Central Committee member develops a lech for Dreyman’s girlfriend. Ferocious, über-straitlaced Stasi operative Gerd Wiesler (brilliantly—brilliantly!—depicted by the late actor Ulrich Mühe, already mortally ill during filming) is assigned to monitor the comings(!) and goings at Chez Dreyman to get the goods on the dramatist and clear the field for his powerful rival. Unfortunately for the designs of swinish Minister Hempf and of sleek Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz, Wiesler’s old classmate and now superior, their chosen instrument proves to be that dangerous tool, a true believer: a devotee of the socialist ideal as sincere as the object of his clandestine scrutiny. Slowly (and the film is masterful in conveying the gradual erosion of the spy’s zeal) a sympathy develops between the watcher and the watched, and Wiesler is by imperceptible degrees transformed from persecutor to protector.

We were visiting Seattle some years back when The Lives of Others had its theatrical release in this country, and it was playing at a small cinema near our bed & breakfast. I’d hoped to see it then, but in the event we were obliged to await its release on DVD. What I remember from that first viewing, and what particularly impressed me on the reprise, was how intelligently the ending was handled. My own sensibilities and expectations debauched by so much of the American product, I experienced a rising sense of dread during the closing minutes first time out. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Without a foot set wrong the past two hours, the director is going to ruin everything with this sentimental and obvious denouement?”

I needn’t have worried, and ought to have had more faith. Thank god that Steven Spielberg didn’t have the conn. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, you ought to.

Ides of March

After a youth spent in the postwar suburbs of southern California, the first time I lived in a house older than myself was in Santa Cruz. It was a rundown, ill-maintained Victorian rented out to undergraduates as individual rooms, and I didn’t care for it. I spent a summer the following year in a pleasanter house of the same vintage, but I never did warm to the Victorian feng shui. Then I moved to Oakland. I lived for fifteen years—from mid-September 1977 to mid-March 1993—in a lovely craftsman bungalow in Oakland’s tony Rockridge district. I was married when I moved in; divorced a few years, and still in shock a bit from the dreadful endgame, when I was compelled to vacate the premises twenty years ago today. I had externalized a great deal of my identity back then, about half as “husband” and the rest as “the guy with the cool old house.” It was accordingly a mere wraith that limped away from the house on Hillegass Avenue to inferior and charmless premises a few blocks distant.

Today I live in an area I would then have derided as “Baja Oakland,” in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (and young: I confess that I regard the reliably middle-aged and prosperous sidewalk population on College Avenue as a bit more simpatico) and a house in some respects as good as and in some others better than the old place. I still regularly find myself in dreams back at Hillegass—generally in a state of panic, realizing that the new owners are due back at any moment, and that I must needs decamp.

Anyway, here’s a close re-creation of the postcard I sent out (social media being then at a somewhat primitive stage of its development) to friends announcing my forced relocation. I was feeling...ill-used.