Essay? Fiction? Who knows.

Two sets of jowls flop at each other on the television. Old white jowls, spotted with age and bouncing with the vigor that only violent disagreement can imbue them with. The names, time, and channel are largely irrelevant., a depressing fact. I sit, mesmerized, almost completely oblivious to the bullshit they spit at each other, chunks of predigested meat no doubt memorized from the morning fax from the national machinery, and I wonder about the men attached to those jowls. Do they head out for old single barrel scotch after the taping? Do their wives know each other? When you take on the job of mouthpiece, are you required to actually believe the garbage you profess to believe on television? No one in the illusory world of television is real I imagine. Politicians hold press conferences to race bait or gay bash or question intellectualism, then go back to their offices staffed by homosexual black PhDs. Preachers command huge audiences and collect tithes, looking the camera straight in the eye, compelling the old and poor to submit to Jesus and his work, gold flashing from the hands and wrists protruding from the ends of their Armani suit jackets, surgically perfect shaved teeth glistening in the studio lights. And the audiences buy right into it. Actors become the characters they portray, embodying the virtues and vices of their fictional likenesses. Supreme Court justices quote action dramas in legal arguments. Accepting the illusion is easy. I suppose that’s the heart of it. Truth is hard, it takes time to uncover, effort to pan for it in the mud of personal viewpoint and interpretation. How much easier to accept the visible, the spoken, the broadcast.

over the top chunks of noir

The brat stopped crying around 2 am, just about the time of night I usually fix up my last bourbon, single barrel, neat. The damn thing wailed for hours every day, started just when the sun set. Maybe she cried for the loss of the light, the cold, grim truth of lonely death. Maybe she bore the yoke of our crumbling world. Probably, she was just hungry.

////

The flashing red numbers told the story. Noon again, always and eternally noon. I hated those goddamn numbers, the repetition, the grim reminder of empty routine. Thralls to the cult of the running clock were whirring, no doubt, propelled on by their collective illness, the sick fascination with the progress of seconds, the slow drip of impending mortality.

sonnet

It's hard to see where I might be right now
if I had begged off due to circumstance
and not been there that night. In fact, throughout
those years, I never gave myself a chance
at feeling love again, not in that way.
Imagine my surprise at finding you,
an island full of mystery, so fey
across the room. I remember moving
around so I could watch your dancing gaze.
It was your eyes that drew mine to your face,
alive and bright, and full of spark and fire.
And when the dying night had found the space
between us almost nothing, it required
that I surrender, give up my old walls,
the fortress of myself began to fall.

moment

untwist the sheets
as i slide between
soft cotton
and warm skin
pressed against mine
pale and bare
in faded yellow slats of light
pushing through the glass
and soon you wrap me
under your arm
without thought
still sleeping

slow wind creeps by
outside the window
down the wide empty avenue
the only sound
brushing the palms
quiet voice of the lonely
your grasp tightens
briefly
then relaxes
and you slip away

Nerdy

The cold, flat metal of the ovoid shell was pocked and scarred, its damaged skin catching the light from the bright star peering through the rent hull of the broken ship. An occasional explosion still ripped through the remains. Thin, ragged figures drifted in the hollow where the bridge once sat, where the capsule remained aloft and silent, running lights darkened. Pieces of the ship were strewn about it, a cloud of turrets, bodies, dully glowing toxic clumps of propulsion material from the ruptured drive, tumbling golden armor throwing off spears of glinting light. The arc of the planet curved away into night below. Four menacing shapes slipped back into the veil of space and disappeared.

Dream III

I am asleep, rolled up on the couch in the living room. Everyone else is upstairs. The air is cold and hard, and I can feel it spilling down the stairs, pooling around me. The thing is sitting outside the window, waiting. The shades are drawn, and I am wrapped in a thick blanket, but I am icy, shivering. The intensity of the emotion, the alien hate rolling through the thin glass, is crushing my breath from my lungs. The weight on my chest is unbearable, and I am starting to panic. My body won't move. I strain to shift my arms or head, strain to breathe, push with every ounce of energy I possess.

Dearest netizens

Independent is spelled with an 'e' not an 'a'.

You're, your, there, their, they're, its, it's: learn them.

A ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ lot.

ConsEquence.

If you have a conference (n), you confer (v), you do not conference (v).

If you have a conversation (n), you converse (v), you do not conversate.

Dream II

I am riding in a car on some nameless street, no details stand out. A man is beside me, driving. I feel nothing, no fear, no anger, as he reaches across the center console with his right hand wrapped around a large, jagged knife. I grab his wrist and hold his arm effortlessly still. The knife is silver, with a black handle. It has steel rivets through the handle, and a metal cap at its base. I look across at him, and notice that he has no face, just a sheet of skin where it should be. I find this faintly alarming. Still holding the knife away from my chest, I turn and look out the window. There is nothing anywhere, a blank world, except for crowds of faceless men walking unbroken gray ribbons of sidewalk. The sunshade is down, and I see myself in the embedded mirror, unbroken skin from forehead to chin. The knife is buried in my chest. The blood runs across the steel rivets, almost invisible on the black handle, until it twists its way through my fingers and drips down onto my legs.

Dream 1

The bullets are spraying from my guns as I race after the fleet figure. We run up the stairs stacked up in the tower. I can't get any closer, but he can't get away. The concrete walls are splashed thick with graffiti, painted layer after layer. A parking garage, we're climbing the stairs in a parking garage. I fire through the rails, but can't get a clean shot. Finally, he bursts through the metal door on the sixth floor and runs out into the parked cars. The light is grim and blue, harsh fluorescence. I run. Flashing lights are suddenly everywhere, and deep voices are shouting at me. Throw down my weapons. The man slows, stops, and turns. I raise my gun to his forehead. I'm surrounded now, a hundred guns trained on my head and chest. My quarry raises his unblinking eyes. I laugh, and time slows as I pull the trigger. The bullet opens a small red hole in his head. I don't watch to see the spray of blood and brain, instead I turn, and place my gun in my mouth. The lights glint off the metal. I pull the trigger. *click*. The police unload, and I feel every hot knife stabbing into me.

the dog with one

the dog with one leg
limped out into the corn field
or rather
dragged himself
with a motion something like a
climber
reaching
for a high grip
on a smooth face

the potential energy
the violence
the white teeth
still smooth and sharp
he quivered with it
a trembling battery

his foot left comets
in the ground water filled
up the track(S)
dotted his progress
the broken graph
of the hunt
the birds
of the field
calling
always just out
of reach

Why not?

I'm going to start posting chunks of crap that I've written or played with. My attention span is so short that nothing ever goes anywhere except poems, but maybe I'll get inspired.


///

The flashing red numbers told the story. Noon again, always and eternally noon. I hated those goddamn numbers, the repetition, the grim reminder of empty routine. Thralls to the cult of the running clock were whirring, no doubt, propelled on by their collective illness, the sick fascination with the progress of seconds, the slow drip of impending mortality.

Talking Points

:(

An Empty Wish

It is not difficult to make the argument that the ongoing campaign to capture the upcoming American general election has demonstrated the extent to which electronic media have come to dominate the political discourse. Leaks, revelations, asides, refutations, smears, allegations, and rumors travel instantly, gaining momentum and traction among the wilderness of the connected populus before possibly surfacing in the publications of the more inertia bound disseminators. This appears, on its surface, to lead us towards the realization of a real populism, an unrestrained, volatile, frothy discourse on which the ideas of merit will rise, imbued with a natural buoyancy by their inherent value.

An obvious example employed by those that hold this position is the rise and candidacy of Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. Largely driven by a low-level, internet savvy campaign, Obama overcame the powerful, coordinated machinery of the Democratic old guard, machinery focused on message control in the older media. His fundraising efforts have been fueled by an unprecedented number of small donations by lower income and younger citizens, the web based operation allowing him a flexibility he might not enjoy otherwise. American progressives leapt to support him, countless blogs and discussion forums latching on his early and repeated opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He has been carried by an unprecedented wave of internet populism.

Obama, in many ways, is a Reagan for the Age of the Internet. He sits at a rare convergence of politics, economics, and media, and he is uniquely qualified to take advantage of his position. He is elegant, young, and educated. His speeches are notable for their eloquence and projection of genuine concern. His personal discipline is incredibly well maintained, as is the discipline of his political apparatus. However, the efficacy of his campaign's strategy actually serves to illustrate the flaws and dangers of the current environment. The unity of voice that his message has produced is sadly familiar. The term 'echo chamber' has been used to describe much of the discourse occurring in electronic fora, and as tired as the phrase has already become, it is tellingly accurate.

A central responsibility of the traditional media, and in particular newspapers, is to report accurate, relevant, and timely stories. It seems clear that this is partially to blame for the falling influence of real journalism in the national discourse. How can a newspaper, restricted by accountability and bound to accuracy and the appearance of fairness, compete with organizations and individuals that mix traditional reporting with bloggers, rumors, and politically informed agendas, often indistinguishably? In discharging their obligations, newspapers necessarily become slower and more cautious than their younger competitors. Proponents of new media like to argue that the mainstream media is tired, outdated, and obsolete. They argue that new media gives voice to the voiceless, empowers the powerless, lifts the veil that shrouds the gap between the elite and the humble. There is no doubt that these new forms of communication have broad appeal, and have engaged hundreds of thousands of people.

Unfortunately, this has not, in general, led to a grand new era in American republicanism. It is in human nature to be tribal, and one doesn't have to look very hard to find this writ large on the manner in which people have employed these new media. It is not clear at all that the electorate is any more educated or informed than it has been in the past, unless talking points and soundbites are considered knowledge. Instead we find tribes, collections of like-minded people who cluster together, group-think laced through the strains of their discourse. Christopher Buckley is fired from the National Review, his famously conservative father's magazine, for endorsing Barack Obama. His colleague Kathleen Parker questions the wisdom of selecting Sarah Palin as a potential Vice President, and is drowned in violent, abusive email. David Frum raises legitimate points on Rachel Maddow's show, and is buried in arguments that don't address the fundamental issue he is trying to raise. The public commentary on left-leaning news sites is scathing, ignorant, and reactionary, single-minded and monolithic. The public commentary on right-leaning news sites is scathing, ignorant, and reactionary, single-minded and monolithic. Opposite viewpoints are howled at with a fervor that defies reason. There is little argument, just scorn.

This is the current that flows beneath our national conversation. It is rarely exposed, but all the more memorable when it is. The McCain campaign is dancing on the edge of this current in the final run to the election, but it would be foolish to assume that the same type of reactionary tribalism doesn't exist on the left. We the People display our worst natures when we consistently fail to recognize that there are frequently legitimate, reasoned, intelligent objections to our deepest held theories and opinions, when we don't even take the time to listen to our opponents. How much faith do we have in our beliefs and philosophies if we are incapable of defending them, or even listening to criticism?

It is asking a towering feat of a man to stand astride this gap, but that is the job that Barack Obama is going to face. The most frightening aspect of an angry mob is its tendency to turn on its own. Obama will likely immediately face choices that are going to anger his supporters, and the poisoned atmosphere of the run up to the election already has the right steaming. It would serve us all to recognize that unilateralism is just as dangerous in thought as it is in foreign policy.

George Will

WASHINGTON -- We are waist deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots of the financial crisis without transgressing this cardinal principle of politics: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.

Let's begin by making sure that the reader knows that we will be tarring the citizenry for the current crisis in economics.

Concerning which, a timeless political trope is: Government should budget the way households supposedly do, conforming outlays to income. But the crisis came partly because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does, hitching outlays to appetites.

I'll mention in passing my distaste for deficit spending. Now that I have your attention, I'm going to proceed to the central argument of my column: rash use of credit by American families is fundamentally at fault for the current problems in the economy.

Beneath Americans' perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar's worth of government. Conservatives participate in this, even though deficits fuel government's growth by obscuring its cost.

Most Americans are too naive and uneducated to realize why they believe what politicians of all stripes hammer away at in every single election. Indeed, they are just as guilty as the government that they allow to run rampant. I'd also like to mention that I still firmly stand with Reagan. The government is the problem, not the solution.

The people can emulate the government because credit has been democratized. Democratization of everything is supposedly an unquestionable good, but a blizzard of credit cards (1.5 billion of them, nine per cardholder), subsidized loans and cheap money has separated the pleasure of purchasing from the pain of paying. Furthermore, the entitlement mentality fostered by the welfare state includes a felt entitlement to a standard of living untethered from savings.

Every evil perpetrated by the citizenry can be blamed on the "welfare state". Watch as I carefully create a connection between the availabilty of credit, which has little to do with the government beyond the LACK of regulations in place to control the corporations that provide it, and the conservative standby of unearned entitlement. Pay no attention to the fact that there is little more than a tenuous correlation here.

Populism flatters the people, contrasting their virtue with the alleged vices of some minority -- in other times, Jews or railroad owners or hard money advocates; today, the villain is "Wall Street greed," which is contrasted with the supposed sobriety of "Main Street." When people on Main Street misbehave by, say, buying houses for more than they can afford to pay, they blame the wily knaves who made them do it, such as the "nimble" Babbitt.

Now, I'm really going to go over the top. Populism, i.e. a poltical movement defined by and beholden to the will of the populace, typically the working and middle classes, is about setting up a straw man to bash to keep the masses free of any hint of blame. Let's throw the Jews in there for color. I know it seems a bit forward, but the position I am espousing here is something along the lines of Daddy Knows Best. I'm not going to let a trace of blame for the financial instutions that shopped these loans aggressively and took advantage of longstanding respect and reputation enter my arguement.

Knowing that heat breeds haste, errors and unintended consequences, George Washington praised the Senate as the saucer into which legislation is poured to cool. In this crisis, however, the House of Representatives has performed that function. Republicans, especially, slowed a Gadarene rush to ratify the deeply flawed original bailout legislation.

Just a bit of flavor now. Founding Fathers and all that.

Voting against the bill -- against putting taxpayers' money at risk in order to clean up a mess that some people got rich by making -- was easy, but not necessarily wrong. The $700 billion figure exaggerated the plan's probable cost, but accurately measured something worse -- the enormous enlargement of government's power.

My objections to this bill have little to do with the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

So the joint declaration by John McCain and Barack Obama that Congress should "rise above politics" was mere gas. The legislation touched elemental questions -- the meaning of justice, the parameters of freedom and the proper functions of government. Democrats charge that the crisis is market failure arising from an insufficiency of government, in the form of regulation. Well.

We need to conflate John McCain's incohernt, irrational approach to this particular game with Barack Obama's, regardless of the lack of similarity. Political expediency will not be a factor we discuss.

Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the first bailout of Chrysler (it, Ford and GM are about to get $25 billion in subsidized loans). Might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?

I need an example, somewhere to fix the blame. Here's one I can bend to fit this situation. We leave tacet any mention of the S&L recovery, and the housing fix of early last century.

Suppose there had never been implicit government backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Better yet, suppose those two had never existed -- there was homeownership before them, just not at a level that the government thought proper. Absent Fannie and Freddie -- absent government manipulation of the housing market -- would there have developed the excessive diversion of capital into the housing stock?

Again, let me stab at the crux. The government's size and involvement in American life is improper when it involves actions on the level of the citizenry. This broad brush simultaneously paints homeowners and the government. Little mention is to be made of corporate exploitation, as the market rules all and acts naturally.

The rising generation of thoughtful Republicans was represented on both sides of Monday's vote. Virginia's Eric Cantor, 45, and Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, 38, supported the legislation because they had helped to achieve substantial improvements in it, such as requiring financial institutions to help finance their bailout, giving the Treasury potentially valuable equity in firms revived by public funds, and eliminating a slush fund for Democratic activists. Texas' Jeb Hensarling, 51, and Indiana's Mike Pence, 49, voted against what they considered a rescue model fundamentally flawed because (in Hensarling's words) it "could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government."

Contortionists are no more flexible than me. I laud Republicans on both sides of the vote. Some are fighting the evil, federalist Democrats. Some are fighting the evil federalist government. All hail Repubicans, the leaders of tomorrow. I am highly educated, and quite aware of the level and type of government involvement in regulating and controlling the financial elements of foreign economies, but I have a drum to beat.

It is potentially catastrophic that this crisis comes in the context of a closely contested election and a collapse of presidential authority. Congress should disconnect from a public that cannot be blamed for being more furious about than comprehending of this opaque debacle. The public wanted catharsis, and respect for its center-right principles, and got both with Monday's House vote. It still needs protection against obliteration of the financial system.

Let me close by indicating my support for Presidential authority, perhaps a nod to the unitary executive theory. The public is ignorant and angry, but to be forgiven for raging along the paths that its Republican virtues lay out. The solution should lie with those who know better. Republik Uber Alles.

To clarify, my analysis of Will's column, which is in bold, is not intended to absolve the public of any blame for the current crisis, but I find offensive the notion that the free market acts instinctively and only reacts to situations that the people/government create.

Person First Language

I can't even describe the stomach pain that this evokes in me.

If there are people incapable of distinguishing between an adjective and a noun, should the rest of us destroy the cadence and clarity of our language to accommodate them?

Adjectives precede nouns because the grammar of our language dictates that descriptors come before the objects they describe. Interpreting this as some kind of hierarchical code seems a stretch.

The fact that this seems most prevalent in education is not surprising in the least.

Even more amusingly, there seems to be a struggle between two theories of disability that is being carried out partly in the use of person first or person second language.  Partisans, march on.

Stories like this one are depressing. Becoming obviously pregnant appears to move you into a special social class, where the old sexist beliefs of our culture can move from the quiet shadows into the open air. Even better, random strangers seem to feel empowered to determine appropriate behavior and consumption for a pregnant woman.

Between fetus worship and paranoid risk aversion, maybe we'll just decide to lock all the preggers up in special facilities guaranteed to ensure that they subjugate themselves entirely to their impending motherhood and that their treatment of the god-babies inside them is up to snuff.

Hillary Clinton

What kind of place do we live where an "Emotional Moment" gets more play than anything any candidate is saying about any issue?

Smoke