Month: November 2002

I only had four dollars in my pocket when I went to the public library today, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing. They were having a book sale, and this one was a good one. Library book sales are a “feast-or-famine” proposition, and this one’s definitely a “feast”. I’ll probably go back before it ends. Today I picked up the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (which I have wanted to read for years) and Walter Cronkite’s A Reporter’s Life. (The biggest table, of course, was loaded with Harlequin romances; and there were lots of outdated computer books from Those Ancient Days of Yore….1998.)

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I appear to be running the risk of turning into a political blog, but I just have a couple of notes and thoughts that I want to get out of my system.

:: So Dick Gephardt has stepped down as Majority Leader. This is hardly surprising, given the Democratic failure in this week’s elections, but I don’t think his departure is quite like Newt Gingrich’s in 1998, in that when Gingrich departed he really departed: he resigned his seat entirely and left Congress. Gephardt’s decision, to me, seems more like a bit of positioning for a 2004 Presidential run. (Not that he has a chance of winning the nomination, but that’s what I think is going on here.)

:: As long as Democrats are sobbing in their beer this week, it might be helpful to consider the numbers. This was not a Reagan-vs-Mondale type of political blow-out; it was actually a very close election. The majority in the Senate that just changed hands was razor-thin to begin with, and now it’s widened to paper-thin status. There seems to be a meme forming that the Republicans delivered a staggering knock-out type punch to the Democrats, but that’s simply not the case. The races were sufficiently close that if 100,000 votes in the right races had changed hands (out of 40,000,000 cast), the Democrats would be doing all the chest-thumping about their mandate. I’m reminded of 1992, when the USA Today ran the headline “LANDSLIDE!” after Bill Clinton won the Presidency, despite the fact that Clinton failed to even win a majority of the votes.

:: I’m not running a warblog, but noting today’s passage of a “This is your last chance” UN resolution, I’m thinking that it’s time for the anti-war voices in the US to finally answer the question that keeps vexing me as I try to decide whether or not I’m for this war: What do we do if and when Saddam Hussein fails to comply? I really do not want to favor the war against Iraq, but I’m not seeing that there’s much choice in the matter. It’s sort of like that old chestnut: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains — however improbable — must be the truth.” It’s distasteful as hell, because I’m not convinced we have any plan for after the war that will make things appreciably safer, and because maybe we wouldn’t be in this damnable mess if we hadn’t created Saddam Hussein in the first place, and, well, because I don’t like the company I’d be in if I decided that I favored the war. So, if the anti-war crowd is going to make the convincing argument for their position, now’s the time. (By the way, one of the most convincing arguments for war that I’ve encountered can be found here.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Adirondack Mountains.

Now that I’m living in Syracuse, I’m much closer — about an hour’s drive, I think — to the foothills of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. These are some of the highest of the Northern Appalachians, but I’m not terribly familiar with them. I am hoping to rectify that in the near future.

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Entertainment Weekly had an article a week or two ago about what’s wrong with The West Wing. I didn’t agree with everything the article said — I find the ongoing storyline about Qumar fascinating, for example — I have to agree with the article’s writer on one thing: the show now has too many characters. There are so many supporting players now, weaving and wending their way through the main characters’ lives, that it’s hard to keep track of them all and now the storylines are starting to seem rushed as nothing is really developed fully, as opposed to being briefly updated before moving on to the next thing. Now they’ve added Christian Slater to the mix, and since he’s a “Special Guest Star” I suppose that will mean more screentime for him, at the expense of…someone. I still love the show, though, and I still watch it faithfully, which is more than I can say for Entertainment Weekly. One of these days I’ll remember to cancel the subscription….

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One of my favorite television shows is NBC’s Ed, about the small-town lawyer who owns the bowling alley. The show has an excellent cast of characters and a quirky type of humor that’s reminiscent of Northern Exposure.

That said, something about Ed is bugging me this season.

Remember the scene in the movie Misery, when Annie Wilkes has just read Paul Sheldon’s new manuscript, the one she’s forced him to write after he’s apparently killed Misery Chastain off in his latest novel? Annie goes into a raving rant about how when she was a child she went to the movies, one of those old serials, to see the resolution of the previous week’s cliffhanger; but the resolution was actually a cheat because the situation had been changed, and Annie was the only one who noticed. Well, something similar seems to be happening on Ed.

The backbone of Ed is the on-and-off romance between Ed and his life-long love, Carol Vescey. Last season, Carol ended up falling in love with the prickly-but-intelligent high school principal, Dennis Martino, who is a recovering alcoholic and who also has a hard time getting close to people. The key word here is “prickly”, because Dennis showed flashes of warmth and depth last year, suggesting that he was a man with a streak of kindness but who was terrified to let it show. One telling episode was when Carol begged Dennis — a former English teacher — to critique a short story she had written, and he finally relented after much resistance and basically tore the story to shreds. Then, later on, when Carol’s confidence is shaken, he writes out a list for her of opinions he’s held that are at odds with reality, to show “his history as a critic”. (The only item I remember is his onetime belief that “Aquaman will be bigger than Superman”.) And there were other examples of this as well, which made the Ed-Carol-Dennis love triangle interesting: because it involved three likable, flawed characters one of whom we knew was going to end up heartbroken.

Unfortunately, the writers of Ed have changed the dynamic of the triangle in mid-stream, so it’s becoming more irritating than interesting. What they’ve done is to change the “prickly” in Dennis to “prick”. Now we’re seeing that Dennis is a cold, manipulative jerk whose behavior toward Carol occasionally borders on the emotionally abusive. Not only does this make the whole love-triangle pretty much like every other love triangle on TV these days, but it’s doubly bad because it totally contradicts what was established last year about the Dennis Martino character. It makes it easier for things to work out the way that we “want” them to work out, but now there is a note of falsity about the whole proceedings.

You have to be consistent with your characters, folks. It’s pretty important.

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Well, the Most Important Election in Modern History is over. America was at a crossroads this year, and the choice we as a nation had to make had never been more clear until yesterday. We have chosen the road that will determine the future course of our lives, our childrens’ lives, our grandchildrens’ lives….

….at least until 2004, when once again we will face the Most Important Election in Modern History as we again stand at a crossroads, when the choice before us will be clear as it has never been clear before.

And once 2004 is over? Well, it’s just four short years to 2006!

I find it strange how we always couch our election rhetoric in the most dire language possible, as if every election that comes along is a moment in time like The Lord of the Rings, when the Third Age is ending and the Elves are leaving and the final reckoning with Sauron is at hand — but at the same time, we also console ourselves with the other great meme of democracy: that if we decide we don’t like what the folks we just put in office do, we just vote them out next time around. Democracy, for all its wonders, is a pretty schizophrenic thing, both profound and banal, both momentous and mundane. Democracy requires us to hold two contradictory beliefs: that everything depends on what choice we make today; and a wrong choice is pretty easily fixed down the road.

I’m a registered Democrat, so yesterday’s results are disappointing to me, but they were not totally unexpected. The Democrats seemed to view winning yesterday not so much as a goal to be sought and worked toward, but rather a cosmic reality that demanded lip-service and hushed reverence. They constantly talked about the fact that the party controlling the White House almost always loses seats in Congress come the mid-terms, and yet no one considered the historical reason for that fact: it’s generally a corrective act on the part of the public, a reaction to a new Administration’s invariable over-reaches and foul-ups. The problem for the Democrats here was twofold: they already managed to take control of the Senate a year and a half ago, providing that very correction; and a war erupted. So in the former case the Democrats were partly victims of their own success; in the latter case, the Democrats simply messed up by acting the part of opposition in foggy, undefined fashion that never looked all that genuine (except in the case of Paul Wellstone).

So the Democrats over the last two years — since the inauguration of President Bush — have been a party of “against”, of “opposition”, of “No”. All those have their place, but the election was a time for them to be “for” something and to advance real, alternative ideas. The “I’m not that guy” strategy, in politics, is always risky: just ask Doug Forrester, the Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey, whose entire strategy was “I’m not Torricelli” — and whose entire strategy evaporated when Torricelli bailed out. “We’re not Bill Clinton” was the Republican strategy in 1998, and it was a disaster. “I’m not Bill Clinton” was the unstated premise of Al Gore’s campaign, and he’s now a private citizen (although not by much). George W. Bush also used “I’m not Bill Clinton”, but he did it in a positive way (and, anyway, he really lost). So, along came the Democrats with their “We’re not Republicans” strategy this year. OK, fair enough — but they never offered any answer to the follow-up question, “So what are you, then?”

Yes, I found yesterday’s results disappointing. No, I don’t see them as unmitigated disaster. Democrats who act as if the country has just made some horrible turn to the right and that liberalism is dead are as wrongheaded as Republicans who act as if they’ve just been given the Keys to the Kingdom. For all the sports metaphors we inject into our political debate in this country, the fact is that democracy is not the Super Bowl. The game is not over. The game is never over. So, Democrats, stop acting like you’ve just lost everything you’ve ever dreamed of. And Republicans, stop acting like you’ve just won everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Both of you, get up off the damn bench and get back in the game, because the game never ends. Only the players do.

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POETICAL EXCURSION #9

“Arms and the Boy”, by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads

Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,

Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;

And God will grow no talons at his heels,

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

:: The dates of Owen’s life make his fate fairly obvious: he was killed in action during World War I, ironically just a week before the formal cessation of hostilities. I am not certain as to when this poem was written, but it definitely appears to spring from Owen’s “anti-war” period, which began roughly around 1917 and formed the last year of his life.

What interests me here is Owen’s concept of human nature. Since humans are not equipped by nature for war, we must create our weapons ourselves: our teeth are not suited to fighting, we have no talons for shredding the bodies of our enemies, and our heads do not sport antlers. Owen says more than this, though, through his personification of the weapons that we have made. It is not that we long for war and thus create these things to fight it; it is that the weapons themselves that are “keen with hunger for blood” and “long to muzzle in the hearts of lads”. The implication is of war as an unending cycle: we create the weapons, whose desire for blood we must then fulfill. War becomes less a means by which grievances between nations are prosecuted and matters of good and evil are settled, and more a primal thing: war not as necessity, but as appetite, and cruel appetite it is, a type of bloodthirst against “lads” who would be better eating apples.

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It’s Election Day, and a lot of voices in the Blogiverse have been analyzing issues and candidates and telling us to get out and vote. If I may be so bold, allow me to offer a differing view, courtesy of George Carlin:

You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

(from Napalm & Silly Putty by George Carlin.)

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It’s a funny thing about gyms.

One of the nice benefits of the apartment complex in Syracuse where I now live is the presence of a gym, which we are able to use at will as part of our rental agreement. It’s not a big gym: two treadmills, a recumbent exercise bike, a stairclimber, a Nordic-track like device, and a universal weight machine. It’s a basic gym, but big enough and nice enough for my needs. The only thing missing that I would like to see is a set of free-weights.

The funny thing is that I think I may have uncovered a law of nature regarding gyms: in any gym, no matter where the gym is or how restrictive its clientele, there will be a regular person at the gym — always a man, by the way — who works out in jeans and a flannel shirt, who grunts and grimaces and moans his way through a workout which consists of benchpressing as much weight as he possible can, as quickly as he can, and slamming the weights together as loudly as he possibly can. This guy will, in between sets, wander around the room windmilling his arms and doing that useless stretch that every pseudo-athlete does: the one where you stand on one foot while reaching down and tugging on your other ankle, presumably stretching the quadricep or something like that. Why this guy does that stretch, and no other, is a mystery as his workout regimen is geared exclusively to his upper body.

I truly believe that if one were to open a gym in the wilds of the Yukon, accessible only by dog sled or water-landing plane that takes off from the lake ten miles away, that gym would have a guy like this as a member.

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Well, I’m finally starting to get some hits from people searching Google for, well, “naughty items” — such as this. Of course, I’m sorry that these potential readers are going away unfulfilled — I think.

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