Darth Dribbles

Darth Cheney, edging ever closer to Becoming One with the birthers, the deathers, the teabaggers, and all the other far-fringers currently eating away at the corpse of the Republican Party, has decreed that President Barack Obama “doesn’t fully understand or have the same perception of the US role in the world that most Americans have.”

Obama’s a dim-bulb stumblebum traitorous Muslim Kneegrow, that what you’re sayin’, Darth?

Darth next darkly intimated that another nefarious Kneegrow, Attorney General Eric Holder, is some sort of febrile Manchurian prosecutor hell-bent on dragging terrorists up to New York so they can there propagate Evil.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out what Holder’s intent here is in having Khalid Sheikh Mohammad tried in civilian court other than to have some kind of show trial. They’ll simply use it as a platform to argue their case—it’ll be a place for them to stand up and spread the terrible ideology that they adhere to.”

Darth, who was okay with his hireling George II smooching Saudi princes, and prancing about with them hand in hand, also fulminated that Obama’s respectful bow last week to the Emperor of Japan was “fundamentally harmful” to the United States.

Dang, Darth! Sounds like mebbe you think somethin’ pretty darn drastic oughtta be done to that Kneegrow!

Darth’s bilge was spilled Monday morning on something called the Scott Hennen Show. Hennen is the smooth-talking smoothbrain assigned by the rightwing noise machine to organ-grind lies out the radio in the Fargo, North Dakota region. As evidenced in the photo to the right, Hennen is a hunter, so it is possible that at some point Darth may be compelled to shoot him in the face.

Peasant Palate: I Will Make You Gumbo

We’re a family who for 40 years flowed back together for Thanksgiving, there in a little house on the coast of California. But people, they do get old, and so the woman who rented the place to us all those years, for a modest, reasonable fee, was recently forced to pass the property on to her children, who, it develops, are Robbers. They want rent achievable only by folks who serve on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs. So this year this family will stay scattered.

A few years ago I developed a serious gumbo jones, and one year took my spike to the coast for Thanksgiving. There I succeeded in hooking all the junior members of the family. Since this year I will be unable to stand and deliver, I’m posting here the recipe, so all the scattered family can brew the drug in their own homes.

My recipe is a variation on that of the folks in the photo above, Maudice and Bill Gentry, presently of Oakland, California, formerly of Texas and New Orleans. Gumbo, associated most with New Orleans, is a West African, Afro-Caribbean dish, with French and Choctaw Indian accents. Some folks think gumbo must contain okra, but in this they are Wrong. You can put okra in it, but it’s no more necessary than is owl or monkey, which some folks also like to see floating in their gumbo.

Head Trips

Back in July I put up a grumpy post in which I opined that “[d]reams are but a nocturnal processing system, of information received while the corporeal container is up and about. In any remembered dream I can easily find analogues to events or emotions experienced in an earlier waking state. Or nudges towards things I should, as KGO’s Ray Taliaferro puts it, ‘be thinking about, talking about, or doing something about.’”

Now, according to the New York Times, a Science Man is saying dreams maybe aren’t even that.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Meanwhile, a second Science Man, quoted in the same article, is claiming that dreaming, rather than some form of robotic jogging, is actually “consciousness itself.”

Oo-ee-oo.

Shame The Devil

She was waiting for him with her arms folded.

“I refuse to believe in the existence of a God who permits the suffering of innocent children.”

“So why are we getting married in a church?”

“To melt his heart,” she replied.

—John Le Carre, The Constant Gardener

Willy DeVille, who wrote the song offered below, described it this way:

“It’s a song about a couple who is very in love. They have no money, but someday they wanna get married in a big church, and have a gold earring and new boots. And you wanna look so pretty for that girl. I think men always try to be so ‘macho.’ I think that’s very stupid.”

The guitar-playing, sweet enough to melt any heart, comes courtesy Chet Atkins.

The person who uploaded this song to YouTube cut the thing off while the final note was still in sustain. Proof that things are not yet perfect.

What It Is

Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman’s.

—”On Falling In Love,” Robert Louis Stevenson

The Hyena In Winter

November 16, 2009

Karen says I need to keep speakin’ into this tape recorder, for the book she’ll write under my name, so I can get vindicated by history. So that’s what I’m doin’. At least till the Monday Night Football comes on. Then I need to go drink me some pretzels.

I see he’s over there in Japan now, the kid, Dumbo. Bowing to their emperor. Kid’s got no sense. Everywhere he goes, the bowing. It don’t look right. America don’t bow to nobody: and when he’s president, he’s America. Like I was. Hell, he even bowed to the Saudis, when anybody with any sense knows you’re supposed to hold their friggin’ hands. Have to—otherwise those hands’ll be squirrelin’ all around your pockets, filchin’ your money.

Me and Dad, we never bowed to no Japanese. Dad, he really knew how to handle ‘em—hell, he threw up on the prime minister. Sure: the story went out that it was because he was sick on them pills and that jet lag. But that was a fib. Really he did it on purpose. He’s a real card, Dad. People just don’t appreciate that.

I guess maybe I did screw up with them Japanese that one time. I was feelin’ kind of feisty, after drinkin’ a couple of pretzels, and I tried to do the hoedown-dance with the Japanese prime minister. Didn’t go so well. Dummy just stood there: guess he never heard of the hoedown. And Pootie-poot, he looked at me like he thought somebody oughta put me back in the crib.

Karen—make sure that picture don’t go in the book, will ya?

You Can Never Be Ordinary Again

“We did what we could but it was not enough because I found you here. All of you are not just names on the wall, you are alive. Your blood’s on my hands, your screams in my ears, your eyes in my soul. I told you you’d be alright but I lied. Please forgive me. I see your face in my son. I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids, your girl, your mother. Then you died. I should have done more. Your pain is ours. Please, God. I’ll never forget your faces. I can’t, you’re still alive.”

President Obama is right: of Major Hasan we should not “jump to conclusions.” But there is one thing we can know for certain: the horrors of war are not cabined to those who fight in them.

The centrality of war is the intentional killing of human beings: the healer is charged with preserving life, to “abstain from doing harm.” When these worlds collide, when a healer is tasked with applying the healing arts to those deliberately damaged by war, then, as one nurse learned, “you can never be ordinary again.”

The note quoted above, left by another nurse at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, speaks to that. Beyond the “furthur” are more such voices. Many more.

Possession

We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.

—Franz Kafka

I See Food Dying

Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets. When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish where every passing serial sneezer can feel free to cough, drool, and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperatures, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.

—Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour

“The Crucifix Creates Discrimination”

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.

The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”

Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”

Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.

Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”

La Bete Humaine

Not content with bombing the moon, NASA now plans to bombard monkeys with radiation, to “understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior.”

Monkeys were routinely tormented and tortured in the early days of space flight—on both sides of the Cold War—but this will be the first time in decades that the doubledomes of NASA have decreed it is necessary to flog our cousins for the Greater Good of mankind.

“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” intoned Jack Bergman, behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston. “There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts. That’s not been well assessed.”

Boo

A little holiday music, for All Saints.

To get there, click on the “furthur.”

The creature to the right there is me.

In costume, in disguise.

Happy Birthday Tubes You

The internet turned 40 this week. Astrologically speaking, having been born on October 29, it is a Scorpio, which helps explain the intensity and nastiness it brings out in people.

The first internet message was sent between the University of California in Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute, some 400 miles to the north. Actually, it is more precise to say “the first attempted message sent,” as the internet crashed some two letters into that first message. Which means Bill Gates must have been involved in the thing, even way back then.

The message was supposed to read “login,” but the web surfer was only able to type “lo” before the system went down.

“Lo” is actually a good first word to go out. It sort of has a “let there be light” feel to it. In fact, my Oxford English Dictionary tells me that “lo” was once an abbreviation for “Lord.”

Oo-ee-oo.

And A Child Shall See Them

I was interested in learning more about how young and troubled children perceive things and before filming started I showed some paintings to the children. The results were very revealing and mysterious. I remember one, an Italian renaissance painting which had in the background an entire city with castles and harbours and hundreds of people weaseling around unloading ships, all sorts of things going on. I would project a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds and then turn it off and ask the children, “What have you seen?” And four or five of them in one voice shouted, “A horse! A horse!” “Where on earth is the horse?” I said to myself. So I put the slide back on and searched. “Down there!” they all shouted. And yes, in the corner of the picture was a single horse and a single horseman with a lance. It makes me think to this very day.

—Werner Herzog, Herzog On Herzog

Squirters

Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:

—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.

—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.

—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”

La Musica: What’d I Say?

It is a convention in Anglo-American vocal music that the lyrics should make some sort of sense. The meaning may be dense, or multi-layered, but the lines should not be completely impenetrable, or flat-out imbecilic. A person of reasonable intelligence and attention should be able to suss out what is being said without herculean effort. The music reproduced below, for example, just won’t do: something more than the words “in the frog/perpen-dicular to the frog/far away from the frog/without the frog” must be imparted to the listener.

Generally the search for meaning isn’t a problem. This is particularly so because, in the popular tradition, the message is almost always both straight-forward, and the same—though usually it is at least somewhat veiled. Pop music is all about loin-joining: urging the joining of loins, celebrating the joining of loins, recalling when loins once joined. Ninety percent of all the vocal music that has ever made it onto the radio bespeaks an urgent chemical roiling that may be summarized as follows: “I feel great lust for you, and desire that we engage in sexual congress as soon as possible.” This is the sentiment that lies at the core of almost every love song . . . whether the singer is Rudy Vallee, or Ras. Of course, the veils have slipped some over the past 70 years. Thus, we have moved from the slickly sincere, buttery smooth seduction of “I Only Have Eyes For You,” to Liz Phair’s blunt, bare, matter-of-fact “HWC,” in which she cheerily chirps an ode to the outpouring of her lover’s semen.

Still, there remain those oddities, works wherein the words defy the probings of logic, intuition, or even sanity. I realized this anew recently, when, while driving, an Eric Clapton rendition of “Badge” poured forth from my radio, a song that, while still a joy to listen to, still, after all these years, makes no sense whatsoever.

A Long Way From Semper Fi

US Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North is emerging now as the Charles Manson figure in this hideous scandal that crawls like a plague of maggots on the White House.

Oliver North apparently moved into the White House basement about five years ago and turned himself into something worse than the mad Dr. Frankenstein . . . He was given control of everything he could reach, from the president of Israel and secret US Army bank accounts in Switzerland to the CIA and George Bush and the home phone number of the Chinese defense minister.

Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill.

That was in the good old days, when real men were still running the White House and the president roamed the hallways at night with a beaker of gin in his fist, raving and jabbering at huge oil portraits of Abe Lincoln and John Philip Sousa while Henry Kissinger followed him around and made notes.

Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearly 300 of North’s people.

Not even Tex Colson sold bombs and rockets to crazed Persian maniacs who used them to kill his own kind—and not even Kissinger would have put his arm around him and said, “Well done.”

This is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North.

—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

Sartre’s Crabs

From Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates, a selection of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre by John Gerassi, from the 1970s, to be published this fall by Yale University Press. Translated from the French by the good folks at Harper’s.

After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

The crabs really began when my adolescence ended. At first, I avoided them by writing about them—in effect, by defining life as nausea—but then as soon as I tried to objectify it, the crabs appeared. And then they appeared whenever I walked somewhere. Not when I was writing, just when I was going someplace. The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them.

I would have liked my crabs to come back. The crabs were mine. I had gotten used to them. They kept reminding me that my life was absurd, yes, nauseating, but without challenging my immortality. Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what?

They left me during the war. You know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them—when I’m lonely, or rather when I’m alone. When I go to a movie that ends up boring, or not very gripping, and I remember how they used to sit there on my leg. Of course I always knew that they weren’t there, that they didn’t exist, but they served an important purpose. They were a warning that I wasn’t thinking correctly or focusing on what was important, or that I was heading up the wrong track, all the while telling me that my life was not right, not what it should be. Well, no one tells me that anymore.

All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

Generally, Everyone Sings Incessantly

In Moscow they seized a poem by Stepan Trofimovich, written six years earlier in Berlin, in his first youth, which circulated in manuscript among two amateurs and one student. It is not lacking in poetry, or even in a certain talent; it is a strange piece, but in those days that kind of thing was not uncommon. I find it difficult to give the plot, because to tell the truth I understand nothing of it. It is some sort of allegory, in lyrical-dramatic form, resembling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, then a chorus of men, then of some powers, and it all ends with a chorus of souls that have not lived yet but would very much like to live a little. All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, mostly about somebody’s curse, but with a tinge of higher humor. Then suddenly the scene changes and some sort of “Festival of Life” begins, in which even insects sing, a turtle appears with some sort of sacramental Latin words, and, if I remember, a mineral—that is, an altogether inanimate object—also gets to sing about something. Generally, everyone sings incessantly, and if they speak, they squabble somehow indefinitely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. Finally, the scene changes again, and a wild place appears, where a civilized young man wanders among the rocks picking and sucking at some wild herbs, and when a fairy asks him why he is sucking these herbs, he responds that he feels an overabundance of life in himself, is seeking oblivion, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his greatest desire is to lose his reason as quickly as possible (a perhaps superfluous desire). Suddenly a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on a black horse, followed by a terrible multitude of all the nations. The youth represents death, and all the nations yearn for it. Finally, in the very last scene, the Tower of Babel suddenly appears and some athletes finally finish building it with a song of new hope, and when they have built to the very top, the proprietor of, shall we say, Olympus flees in comical fashion, and quick-witted mankind takes over his place and at once begins a new life with a new perception of things. Well, this is the poem that was found so dangerous then.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

The Light The Heat

The Moon Is Blue

All that is created comes of water.

—Mohammed

NASA is bombing the moon. Last Friday the Houston doubledomes smashed a two-ton rocket hull the size of a bus into the lunar surface. Four minutes later, a second probe, also hurtling through space at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kamikazed into the moon.

The bombing commenced after science-types in September announced they had determined that the lunar polar regions contain water molecules. The bombing was intended to suss out just how much water might be lurking beneath the lunar surface.

The bus-bomb attack, on a two-miles-deep crater at the moon’s south pole, was supposed to send a plume of debris into space that could be analyzed for the presence of sub-surface ice. Although party-poopers at the MMT Observatory in Arizona, which closely observed the shelling, claim not to have detected any debris plume, NASA spokespeaks pooh-poohed this naysaying. “We have the data we needed to address the question of water,” said NASA’s Anthony Colaprete.

The twin bombing, intoned a second spokespeak, is “NASA’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”

Party To No Covenants

His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.

There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.

—Robert Stone, Damascus Gate