Patriotism????

Striking the proper constitutional balance here is of great importance to the nation during this period of on-going combat. But it is equally vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship. It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad. ("The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit government action.") ("It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the nation worthwhile").


-Excerpt from today's Supreme Court Decision to deny the suspension of rights to alleged enemy combatants.

A little bit of National Pride, allowed to creep in, for this succinct and eloquent statement.

Stoned, I’m more of a cultural studies guy…thinking, as I watched porn on a little resizable window on my screen, how much computers have already changed the way I lead my life, this little magic-box center with my music, my work, my porn, my simpsons, all the entertainment, all just cataloged and ready to go. And even how this everpresent window into those other worlds, on our desktop, has changed subtly my sense of space, of what I’m used to seeing in the false-depth of a screen. Not a screen, we’re post screen, we’re in windows now.

Magnetic Fields…

How they show genuine love for their art form, for their very narrow little sliver of music, that never gets any respect—how it’s so naïve you know it must be a form of irony, yet they do it without condescension, ironic yet not at all sarcastic or condescending, the poignancy of that naïve world, we’re so ‘post’ these days, that’s what the media does, makes everything a caricature of itself so quick that you can’t explore it before it’s gone, become an icon, usually a cheap, second-rate one. That’s why the media’s penetration has inevitably meant the quickening, the acceleration of that change—everything is captured up! You want a rebel-girl, here’s alanis morisette and pink and…
You can’t identify with movements anymore, if you’re smart, because they are images and stereotypes by the time they're movements.
Anyway. That was a long aside. Magnetic Fields creates these portraits of that world, that old one we sort of grew up hearing about

Something else about this pace of change, it makes you more critical of the moment, the permenant ironist, always knowing that what’s now is soon to be appropriated and gone, so you are already ironic in your present moment, just laying the ground. Thinking anything will actually hang around is a form of boarishness, foppish soppish sentiment.

But Magnetic Fields does it without condescension, they pull you into that headspace (Wilco, listenting to them now, that’s what they do too. But. I never liked this sort of music because, in part, I couldn’t trust the people who said they liked it, they had some bit of that everpresent irony, that makes me distrustful and distant—some of them are really good people though, even tender and sweet, but the point is when they said they liked it I didn’t know, did they think it was so smart, so purely ironic, so masterful in its imitation, and improvement on, a cliché—or did they sometimes like the very things I’m talking about, and that just didn’t come out in the explanation—

Books and Dollars

Perhaps for we new intellectuals, bookshelves are our bank accounts: We horde books we are unlikely to ever read, we proudly display our stocked shelves, because we are in love with the promise of knowledge there.
Imagining, of course, that we’ll get around to—at least most—of them. Eventually. When things (life) calm down. Quiet down, give us the chance. Just after we get through the pile of New Yorkers, right?
The point I’m making is the stockpiling urge, books are our jewels in safety deposit boxes. We generally feel fine about it, of course. Books contain wisdom! Books are cool! So anti-tech, old-fashioned in the best sort of way. Culture! Art! Line ‘em up!
Visiting an apartment the other day, the woman said with that self-indulgent, feigned-embarrassed glance, ‘we have too many books’, but of course she was bragging really, patting herself on the back for her culture. Whole Harvard Classics Library there, an entire bookshelf-full. In their luxury apartment with the crystal chandelier…
Bohemian rhapsody!

So. Saw the new Michael Moore movie. So. There are parts that are unfair. Like Bush frozen for 7 minutes after hearing of the second plane, striking the second tower, after hearing ‘America is under attack’. Many of us would freeze there, and in that way he is beyond approach. But he is the commander in chief, the one we are expected to be able to turn to in times of direst need, and in that sense his behavior that day makes him worthy, primarily, of our distrust.
But that aside, the movie is frightening, depressing. Most, perhaps, because it reveals the cowardice of the Left, sitting idly by, allowing so much, at so many opportunities.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, tries to dismiss the whole thing because he doesn’t like Moore’s personality—but he does little to dispute the facts, the facts simple and plain enough to cause us outrage, grief, pain and shame.
And he resorts to an even-more simple-minded logic, simple denunciations, forcing everything into a binary which, the facts not fitting, he can dismiss as Moore’s failing—though he is the one doing the forcing.
Anyway. The movie has its failings, yes! But go to the basic facts, and dispute those, you vitriolic windbag! Dispute those, dispute those.

answered a personal ad today.
she was dazzling, dreamy, spanned chasms.

well. wrote back, wrote well but who knows.
these things are strange, trolling things, distant light things, but there it is.
feeling good, these days, like I'm closer to the edge of something, or maybe just feeling edgier, like the ties don't quite bind.
Well.
write the letters, answer the call. see what happens.
ah, to write a stupid posting, late, when you're too tired but feeling strangley compelled.
maybe I'm not, by nature, a blogger.

Sumiyo

When I think back to S, in Nippon, I remember how she gasped and moaned from my first touch—at the time, I thought, what bullshit, what overacting.
Now I realize that culture permeates to that depth, that she moaned like that because that’s how her script goes.
Back to the same notion, our themata, our postures, our scripts. We enact them without realizing it; the bounds of normalcy seem like hard walls, seem far more than convention.
T speaks of ‘classical values’, but that too is just a self-justifying system! Better than some, certainly, but if for him it can ever justify what we did in Central America, than it is chimera at best, delusion more likely.

6.23.04

And she bounded into my room and into my lap and damn, there was a woman, smelling like one and soft and molding herself to my form and damn I wanted her. SO I shouldn’t, SO she’s my roommate and I shouldn’t.
Not even clear that I could, she bounding drunk damn it, bounding soft and molding damn it—

been a while since I’ve written. We turn round and round. We register voters. We imagine alternate worlds, where we’re not all so afraid all the time.

tired now, should just go to bed. think instead about her curves, feel like masturbating maybe, maybe writing more maybe, listening to hip hop.

friend today tells me: So you’ll be in Amsterdam, my man. Well. You know the whole two girl fantasy, my friend? The one that haunts us all? 100 euros. ‘nuff said. 100 euros. And let’s just say I feel temptation. If I lived more without fear, I’d just do it, without feeling I was entering a minefield. What do you think? Should I? Why, the story alone will be worth 100, unless of course it descends into some tale of my inadequacy…

Ups and downs. My decision to not try again is secure, though, because in the end while there may be a possible world in which it could work, that world is not this one—and in the end I would be signing up for a slow march into bitterness and regret. In the end, hell, I was feeling traces of it in the first month, the only month, the narrow window we had before (slam) it ended.
Keep writing. Try to get beyond the blocks of my norms, my boring old thruways.
What do I really feel? Sadness, I don’t want to talk to her call her feel her pain anymore.
Emptiness, something so essential missing here, there isn’t enough magic in my life, and my academic success sometimes feels out of control, sometimes seems to be the thing in charge the thing sweeping me along, passive against its ambition.
Not enough laughter, music, where the glowing afternoons, the spackled light of shade trees, where dancing, casual conversations—
now my epiphanies are all lonely ones.
it occurred to me rather suddenly, shockingly, that I never invite people out. I get invited or feel lonely.
not quite never, not really, but rarely, and usually in a half-assed way of half-steps, have you seen x, done y, oh yeah we should, blah blah blah.
so I just exist quietly in my own space. get high. fuck around on the internet, watch simpsons, whatever.
actually, these times can be precious, can be freeing, can make me feel more like myself—but then they end, I return to the loneliness of crowds, the hell of other people—
I’ve lost much of the ability to set myself apart, to show myself as something more than the tired masses. partly, no doubt, because I’ve partially joined them, but still I have a spark, an ability for heart-talk and transcendence, that I too rarely use these days. My comfort zones are too narrow.
Get on a program, I tell myself.
But then I’m busy and the day is gone and I’m tired tired tired and—
It already spirals ahead! Summer booked solid. Teaching all next year. Where the break? Where the space for other lives, dreams, desires?

And all the complaining in the world, all the same circles, well, go do it.
stream of consciousness not working anymore, just getting me to the same tired ponds.

Retaliatory Reagan top-ten list

removealldoubt.blogspot.com provides a top-ten list of great Reagan moments; allow me a rejoinder! In no particular order:

1. Under Reagan the national debt more than tripled, from about $1 trillion to more than $3.5 trillion. The first trillion was accumulated over 200 years; it took Reagan eight years to add $2.5 trillion more.

2. The number of people beneath the poverty line increased every year Reagan was in office, an overall increase of about 7.5 million people (Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996)

3. Debt as a proportion of GDP went up only during two periods in American history: During WWII, and during Reagan’s presidency.

4. Iran-Contra (selling arms to a state that sponsors terrorism in order to illegally funnel monies to a group of murderous thugs responsible for the torture and execution of thousands of civilians, as well as illicit drug trafficking into the US…but at least they weren’t communists!).

5. The more than 30 Regan aides that spent time in prison for bribery, corruption, and influence peddling.

6. Training future Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan (but they were only killing Soviets!)

7. Backing out of a commitment to Canada’s PM on the enforcement of measures to curb acid rain (Kyoto anyone?). But acid rain doesn’t matter does it? Well, the EPA disagrees, see http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/acidrain/society/index.html

8. Little or no cutbacks for programs targeting households making more than $40,000 a year, while programs for households making $10,000 or less (e.g. free-lunch, subsidized housing) was cut by about 10%

9. Waited years to provide any real support for AIDS research, and then only wanted to focus on prevention—described AIDS to his doctor as like measles.

10. And can we forget his sponsorship of Saddam’s war against Iran? Supplying them with WMDs (chemical and biological) that were promptly used on Kurds and Iranians?

None of this to say that some Reagan policies might have been effective, might have helped people, etc etc.

crumbled

If I was a little more zen, I’d have married here. And been happy, funny thing is. I’d have kept that torch in her going strong, we’d have laughed and I’d have talked talked talked and she’d have laughed and teased and gone wide-eyed and teased me for talking past her and it would have been alright.
Instead, I’d have gone…slowly…subtly…not like in a movie but certainly slowly…subtly…bitter. Little curtailing of happinesses, things I’d get elsewhere. Stop talking like that cuz she’ll just not get it and it’s not worth a ten minute explanation and.
fuck. but here you are. if that was something, some muscle, I could just relax, I’d do it now. Take her back, take her in, find that place.
But fuck. Up against my own personal walls, those places I could only get beyond if it was my fulltime job, and maybe not even then. So I’d go bitter, bit by by and never so. But bitter. Fuck. And fuck that.

and yet it still feels selfish. I could be pretty happy, I think. happy, if you go comparative. but I won’t settle for that, and so…the way she was on that last phone call, when she crumbled, jeezus. crumbled. the way her voice went to that place, that place where you’re really terrified, really really terrified. where
god I can’t talk about that, about her voice running crying screaming outside wherever she was sound of traffic that girl who’s shy to kiss me in a crowd.
god that true voice of the lost.

So I decide I can’t risk settling and there is the damage. That voice. I was, during that call, holding myself back the other way, for a change: Holding myself back from taking her back, making it Alright, making any promise that would take her out of that solitude, terror, bewilderment.
So that feels selfish, really really fucking fuck you selfish.
So I have more wine, or spark another bowl.
Simple as that. Once or twice I’ve been pretty fucked up, just getting that way myself at night, and I’ve gone to take a piss and you know how it’s that moment when you’re swaying there that you realize, damn, I’m fucked up, well that’s happened a few times and usually it’s a bar with the sexual innuendo-clad posters or a friend’s house or there’s a party in the next room, but no, it’s just you smoking and drinking your way to a really good (swaying) buzz. And those times I see it, ever the watcher. If it was you, and you were telling me about it, I’d say, that’s supposed to be a warning sign, and I’d be only half joking, and I’d start thinking about your situation.

Ending

There is a happiness there. The question is whether it is a sad and elusive compromised happiness. Or if the amorphous cultural baggage of what Love is supposed to look like have merely convinced me of that, and what is really on offer is happiness, pure and simple, and therefore best of all.
This is as good a time as any to note my privilege: Here I am, deciding if I’ll give her another chance. Somewhere, right about now, she’s retiring to the solitude of her room, and it is beginning to settle around her, the bare cold fact of it, our Ending. And how little else she has, or thinks she has. To fill the space, make the smile come, make the future seem optimistic. Me, I can sit around and write quasi-philosophical tracts about love and risk and whether it could…whether it should...whether she…whether I. But she is alone right now and it’s settling down around her. The terror of her loneliness, the fact that she sees no other roads, at least none appealing.
Poor baby.
And my worry, that all my recalcitrant thoughts about going back to her (or, really, letting her come back to me) center on that one phrase: ‘poor baby’. I want to save her. And in that is the risk of self-sacrifice to do it. Risk, because if you give your life for someone, well, your gone. Somewhere better or perhaps better nowhere at all. But if you give yourself for someone’s happiness through giving them your heart, your future, well you risk a coldness, a bitterness, a slow creeping doom that will make you hard and worse make you hate. My job, then, is to figure out if that’s truly what I’m risking, in thinking even thinking about letting her come back to me…

more (mourning)

I want so much to take the burden from her shoulders, to make it mine somehow. Trade my easier place for her harder place. Take her back even, the ultimate easing of her burden. The self-sacrificial, a la Abraham, truest form of love? She raged at me, called me musekinin, the facts are clear, her position so lonely, so fragile, and I could sweep her back up in our future. I want to take her pain. Before, I nearly took her decision from her, made it myself—then too, it was about removing her from harm’s way. The irony, of course, that in those early days the decision would have been against us, it would have negated us to spare her—now I must, as it were, negate myself, this odd, shifting Truth I’ve found in our wreckage, this notion of needing to be unsettled, ‘the wisdom of insecurity’, of needing a shake up.
Taking her back would run against that, because I’m already too much for her now, let alone when I get up a head of steam, when I’m really moving.
I don’t like to think, these mellower days, of people as simply not smart or good enough. It runs contrary to my nature, really. I mean we’re all dealt a hand and we do with it what we can—perhaps I’m too much, ultimately, a materialist to think much of a notion of worthiness. But the fact remains, she’s not smart enough for me. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because I love her so, her smile dazzles me so, melts me so. But ultimately it means the range of what I express to her gets narrower: Because it’s rarely worth the Long Explain, I just don’t say it at all, just let the thought pass by—but then what we share becomes a smaller part of me, and as I get better at it, at sculpting our space, well I start to censor it further upstream, so it starts to feel more and more okay, but what’s missing still looms.
I don’t think I need someone as obsessively analytic, certainly—but someone who can go there with me when I need to be there, and who is willing to come with me especially as I make meaning from our mad fumblings, our relationship. Someone who can’t do that simply misses me.
With grief, I say I have to let her go. Despite how she crumbled tonight, on the phone, how naked and alone and afraid she feels now, how she can’t see any exits that don’t terrify her. My dear, my baby, my hon, sweet girl, monkey girl, darling darling dear thing.
I fear most desperately that I’ve done your glorious pure heart some damage through all this. Pulled you into a cultural meat grinder you didn’t have a chance of understanding and so it predictably chewed you up. All that, maybe, is my elaborate way of blaming myself, so that we don’t have to blame you for failing to overcome your immaturity so many times, through so many conflicts. But…I knew you, who you were, what you offered. Which is what makes the failure feel like mine. I knew.