Tariq Ali and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Afghanistan and Pakistan

Came across a somewhat-dated but nevertheless kickass speech by Tariq Ali today while drinking after class. Since I didn't know either, I quote from Democracy Now, which calls him a "British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian, Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor."

I cast this video into the web because Ali has the wonderful habit of saying things like this:

I'd say the big problem in Pakistan is the grinding poverty; is the lack of education; is the lack of basic health facilities; is the fact that many many villages still do not have electricity. Running water is in short supply. And on top of this you have a corrupt political and military elite—they're equally corrupt—who sit on the country, live in a bubble, send their children to the top schools, send them abroad, and use the English language to maintain their monopoly.

Wonderful.

Why We're Not Leaving Afghanistan

Our Glorious Leader destroyed the last shred of his already-dubious credibility last night, distorting history for his own already-decided purposes and failing utterly to assuage anyone of anything besides our own, most-cynical suspicions. At best, by dragging out his ninety-day “policy review” before more-or-less submitting to that stuck-up little poindexter of a general, Stanley McChrystal, President Obama has supplied his political opponents with distracting, rhetorical ammunition, endangering (perhaps purposefully) his halfhearted attempts to pass health care “reform” and proving, for all and sundry, that no matter how much he might him and haw, in the end Obama will bend to the prevailing winds of Washington.

Just like all the rest of 'em.

How long, oh Lord, how long? Forever, if at all possible. As the president told last night's class of West Point Cadets:

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. So no, I do not make that decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Notice that slick insert at the end. “Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And presumably any other 'stan that might harbor “terrorists” or “Taliban insurgents” or whomever the Bad Guys will be next. If history holds, once the Taliban are “defeated” (presuming they'll ever be), the U.S. will in all likelihood turn on the corrupt, slave-driving warlords who genuinely rule Afghanistan outside of “President” Karzai's Kabul Bubble, our current “allies” in our lop-sided, ghost war against “terrorism.”

It didn't take long for President Obama to lose me. After about two minutes of rhetorically flogging the memory of 9/11 (the defining knee-jerk reaction of every American politician in this blighted age) he reminds the cadets that Congress and NATO give him the cover to continue Bush's First War. “Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy, and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, we sent our troops into Afghanistan.”

Bullshit. If the Bush years have taught us anything, it's that the United States government requires neither domestic unity or international legitimacy. For anything. We do what we want, when we want, at times with all the subtitle tact of the Borg: We say “Comply!” and the nations of the world would do well not to hesitate, not even to ask, “How quickly?”

The fact remains, Afghanistan's Taliban-led government (which was as diverse and factious a group of power-mad assholes as you're like to find) offered to give us bin Laden repeatedly, before and after 9/11, if only we'd offered them some way to save face. The word in Pashtu is aabroh. We know the concept as "an out." Assume you've got a guest in your house. Your guest contracts nineteen guys from the surrounding neighborhood to go over to someone else's neighborhood and fuck some shit up. Representatives from that neighborhood demand you hand your guest over, but how can you do that in public and still save face with the rest of your neighbors?

As Bush's cadre of power-mad assholes rushed through the halls of NATO and the UN, State Department officials and (one can only assume) CIA back-channelers scrambled to arrange some kind of deal with the Taliban, presumably to head off the war. “We were not serious about the whole thing, not only [the Bush] administration but the previous one," Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post in 2001. “We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities.”

President Obama conveniently forgot to mention that the sticking point, at the time, seems to have been the State Department's insistence that bin Laden face trail in U.S. courts, a novel idea that went by the wayside pretty damn fast once the bombs began to fall and the CIA Black Sites began to rise up. The seriousness of either side in these negotiations remains an open question, as it probably will far into the future. But there's a wonderful quote in that same WAPO article, straight from the first “war president's” mouth:

“We know he's guilty. Turn him over,” Bush said.

Let's stop right there a moment and invert things. Imagine if some crazed, fundamentalist Christian-American, or some radically Ayn Randian, freemarketeer decided to bomb...oh, I don't know...lets just say the Blue Mosque. Imagine if the Taliban demanded then-Glorious Leader George Bush hand over said “terrorist,” that he might face the “justice” of Afghanistan's Sharia-soaked court system. Now imagine if Mullah Omar (remember him?) went on television and answered our requests that Afghanistan provide evidence linking our hypothetical Randian to his alleged crime by declaring, “We know he's guilty. Turn him over.”

And what, gentle citizen of the Empire, do you think the United States would say to that?

Apparently, sometime in February, 1999

...Taliban security forces took bin Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site, according to media reports at the time. They also seized his satellite communications and barred him from contact with the media.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. [Former Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. ] Inderfurth now says the United States interpreted such statements “as an effort to evade their responsibility to turn him over.”

Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. [Former CIA station chief and footsoldier in the 1980's jihad against the Soviets, Milton] Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and communicated its intent by saying he was lost.

“Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,'” Bearden said. “They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do signals.”

We certainly don't do “subtle”.

The Thirty thousand more troops Our current-Glorious Leader plans to pour down the dank, awful hole that Afghanistan has become (on top of the forty thousand he committed back in March) are not a subtle tool. Neither is General McChrystal's plan to bribe the country's various factions into not shooting each other (as we've done in Iraq). It might work—so long as we continue paying the bribes. But what happens when we stop paying the bribes? Iran, 1979, anyone? In the meantime, this policy will leave us with a cadre of unreliable, insecure, drug-dealing warloards for allies.

And all of the above reminiscences might be immaterial anyway. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik told the BBC in October, 2001, that “senior American officials” told him “in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.”

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban [sic].

We have no real reason to believe Mr. Naik out of hand. After all, he's only accusing the Bush Administration of having a secret plan to start a war everyone now claims was foisted upon us by September Eleventh. Even Our (current) Glorious Leader repeated this last night.

“Now let me be clear:” President Obama said. “None of this will be easy.” Thus, on top of his Nobel Prize, Our Glorious Leader earns 2009's No Shit Awards Grand Prize for Speechifying. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society and our leadership in the world.”

I agree with that last sentence completely. These are dangerous times, and they will expose the true, beating, bleeding heart of this country. There's no need to assume we'll find anything as prosaic as the president describes in there, once we crack the country's ribs. Examining such a rarefied organ will require time we may no longer have. Iran may get the bomb. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel already have it, and God knows who else is keeping it on the down low. Antarctica is melting, and nobody cares because no one can find out how to make money from the problem. Unemployment hits 10 percent and what new jobs program does our Commander in Chief roll out?

Say, do you like long hours, low pay, and freezing your ass off in the mountains of a country you couldn't even pronounce eight years ago? Discover a strength like no other, and a country so weird Alexander the Great took one look at it and said, “Fuck...”

“After 18 months,” President Obama continued, “our troops will begin to come home.” Ri-ight. “These are the resources that we need to cease the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.” Until, that is, our publicly announced troop increase causes the ranks of foreign fighters crawling across the 'stans to swell like a cake-addict's boobs. Iraq, 2004? Anybody? How about Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Soviets tried sinking a hundred thousand plus soldiers into that deeper well?

None of this enters into the calculation of our Empire's ruling class. We've known since October that leaving was “not an option” in Afghanistan. We had that right from the horse's mouth...and Robert Gibbs is no broke-down old mule: he's the Administration's designated show pony. As with health care, the real solution to the “problem” of Afghanistan was removed from consideration before we even began. This allowed President Obama to invite a bunch of people over to the White House and emerge three months later to claim what he considers his great “victory”: a “bipartisan” consensus.

The fact is, such a thing exists. In our president's mind, we can never really leave Afghanistan. As soon as we do, what stops the Russians or the Chinese from rolling right over all those poor little Pishtu tribes people? Genghis Kahn tried that too and it worked out great, let me tell ya. I say God's speed to the Russians and the Chinese if they want to waste blood and treasure in those mountains.

But nobody asked me. My opinion is not considered in the debate.

“I am painfully clear that this is politically unpopular,” Obama told a small group of columnists [including the assume-liberal David Ignatius, from who's column this comes] “Not only is this not popular, but it's least popular in my own party. But that's not how I make decisions.”

So congratulations, Teabaggers, for being right for all the wrong reasons. Our Glorious Leader has just admitted, in public, that we do not live in a democracy. Go forth a shop, plebs. Christmas is here. Rose Bowl's coming up, with the Super Bowl afterward, and really, and who really cares about Afghanistan anyway? As Denis Maloney, one of six pro-war protestors who gathered across the street from the two hundred fifty-strong anti-war candle light vigil, said,

“If you consider the fact that that area of the world produced people who killed 3,000 Americans in America, maybe it's about time we went over there and stomped them out.”

God, I love my country.

The Full Speech:

Science and the Occult: A Weird History: Part I

For the past three months, I've been researching the relationship between science and the occult over the last four centuries. It has been a very complex, at-times dysfunctional relationship, and nowadays partisans for both sides would have us believe it ended in a bitter, drawn-out divorce sometime in 1890s.

This is an illusion. The reality is much more complex, and much more weird, than that. In order to understand why, we must begin at the beginning of modern science, with Issac Newton, despite the fact that this beginning is entirely arbitrary. Human beings have consulted occult forces in the course of their daily lives for the whole of recorded history. Over the centuries, certain thinkers rebelled against this trend, claiming that human beings were quite capable of understanding the world without recourse to mysterious systems of knowledge. One such thinker was Newton.

Born the year Galileo died (1643), Newton grew up to dream of reuniting religion and what we now call science. He hoped to reconcile the animosity each system of thought had developed for the other over the previous four hundred years. He offered up his “laws” of motion as as quantifiable proof, not only of a mechanical, explicable universe, but a universe ruled by an imminent God.

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets,” Newton said. “but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." In writing his Principia, he said, “I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity"

Note the choice of words: this was not the god of some church, be it Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox. This is not the God of Abraham and Issac and Jacob, but an imminently reasonable God, who created a rational universe out of rational bits and pieces that any rational man can pick up, look at, and understand.

Newton implied that, thanks to our god-given five senses and that all-important, divine gift: reason—which separates us from the animals—man can know the mind of God. (Women, who obviously lacked reason, would have to wait another few hundred years for that.) The mind of God is, in fact, right there, in that falling apple, and in the undeniable fact that there are rational, mathematical rules governing the way apples fall. All you have to do is invent the mathematics to prove it.

For Newton, the objective of science was not, as Descartes said, to control the world, so much as to describe it. Newton sat in wonder at the ingenuity of a God who could create a being smart enough to sit in wonder of His ingenuity. Writing more on the Bible than what we would call science and what he called “natural philosophy,” Newton studied Scripture for secret codes and hidden messages all his life. This concerned him more than esoteric questions like true the nature of gravity.

It could just be, he said, that gravity is and expression of God's eternal love, pervading the universe with the perfect will of the Divine, which obviously seeks itself out. At it's core, Newton's physics was an esoteric Christian's retelling of Aristotle's: the apple wants to fall, not because it has an independent nature, but because the independent nature of an imminent God willed it to fall. And fall just so invariably, every time. Divine intervention was central to Newton's universe. The image of “God the watchmaker” is not his.

It comes from a joke made by one of Newton's detractors, a fellow called Gottfried Leibniz, who, in a letter to a friend, remarked, “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion."

Gottfried Leibnitz was a German philosopher and mathematician, one of Newton's contemporaries. We use his integral sign every day, if we use calculus, along with his differential notation. He claimed to have come up with calculus in 1674, and published an example ten years later, beating Newton's Principia to press by three years. There's a little bit of calculus in the Principia, but it's not the point of the book, and Newton didn't publish a notation system until 1696, though he said he came up with the idea in 1666. Now we have artifacts to prove that...but for some strange reason they didn't come to light until after Newton's death. The feud between, carried out almost entirely through a series of letters written by their friends, them has become one of the great controversies of early-modern science. It's role in how Newtonian science would come to be understood by politicians, scientists, and the general public, is barely discussed.

The God of Newton's understanding still cared about the world enough to permeate it with His essential love. Thanks to Leibnitz's joke, all that changed. Newton's disciples took one look at Leibnitz's theological diss (a comment on the level with, “You're God is stupid he can't even create a self-winding watch.”) and thought, You know...that's a good point.

After all, if God is so obviously powerful and perfect (he created man, and gave us our five sense and our reason) then why couldn't God create a perfect universe—a universe in perpetual motion? A clock that needs no craftsman. We puny humans started making things like that in the 1500s, when Galileo caught sight of a swinging candelabra and got the idea of using weighted pendulums in his clocks. To the English Enlightenment philosophers, it seemed absurd that God could not have beaten Galileo to that idea by a few eons.John Locke's God was just not only intelligent enough for that, the watchmaker God was, in fact, the ultimate rational designer. No longer immanent, Locke's God was transcendent. The system He created is just so damn perfect He can walk away from it with no problem. Almost as if it were an experiment. Or a mathematical formula so brilliant it eventually solves itself. Because for all his religious beliefs, Newton's laws were ultimately mathematical equations. You could just plug them in and let them do all the hard work for you.

John Locke's God was just not only intelligent enough for that, the watchmaker God was, in fact, the ultimate rational designer. No longer immanent, Locke's God was transcendent. The system He created is just so damn perfect He can walk away from it with no problem. Almost as if it were an experiment. Or a mathematical formula so brilliant it eventually solves itself. Because for all his religious beliefs, Newton's laws were ultimately mathematical equations. You could just plug them in and let them do all the hard work for you.

Maybe not all the work—there was some problem with the orbits of the planets not quite agreeing with Newton's calculations, and all these stupid peasants kept insisting they'd seen rocks fall out of the sky or some such nonsense. But thank God for those irregularities. Without them, what Newton's contemporaries called “natural philosophy” and what we call “science” would've died in infancy for lack of work. The way it stood after Newton's death, natural philosophers could hold up new breakthroughs in their calculations as further proof that the universe was harmonious, lawful, and (most importantly) self-contained. When you have a rational universe created by a rational god and operating on rational principals, there's no need for divine intervention. No need for a Heaven or Hell either, since both are unobservable. Falling outside the spectrum of our five senses and reason, theological questions thus fell outside the realm of natural philosophy.

Newton's most radical disciples (particularly his French ones) even began to toy with the idea that nothing existed outside the physical universe at all. There was quite enough stuff inside of it to deal with, thank you. And nothing could exist save through the agency of Newton's laws. Even if something outside the universe did happen to exist, it would have no effect on the physical world, since there is nothing in the world (they said) operating contrary to Newton's laws.

John Locke applied these ideas to politics. Without an imminent God, the Divine Right of Kings is meaningless. Men are born free, and its up to each and every man (again, women would have to wait a few hundred years) to form a society. More importantly, its up to each and every man-jack of us to consent to such a society, since rulers derive the only real power they have, not from God, but from the consent of those they rule.The Revolutions—from the Glorious one in 1688 to the Latin American ones of the early 19th century—were, in one sense or another, practical applications of these ideas, each experiencing various degrees of success.

If one could apply Newton's idea to human society, why not go further and apply them to human beings as well? In 1766, a German doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna did just that. He called his dissertation De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (The influence of the planets on the human body), and in it he figured that, since every body in nature submitted itself to Newton's laws, then the human body must do so as well. It must be some sort of machine, influenced by the gravitational forces of the other planets. Since any doctoral student knows the human body is full of various fluids, and Newton showed how the moon influences the tides of the earth, maybe the moon, sun, and the other planets, influenced the tides of the human body, causing all kinds of apparently-a-causal diseases. Diseases that might be treatable if only we knew which planets influenced what tides. A little math, our doctoral candidate suggested, might save a lot of lives, or at least make a lot of deaths less painful. And isn't that what doctors should be doing? “First, do no harm,” anyone?

Since this was cutting-edge stuff in mid-eighteenth century Vienna, our candidate got his doctorate and became Franz Anton Mesmer, M.D. Though he never comes out and says it, Mesmer may have borrowed his idea from one of Newton's friends, a doctor Richard Mead, who wrote De Imperio Solis ac Lunae in Corpora humana, & Morbis inde oriundis (On the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human Bodies and the Diseases Arising Therefrom) way back in 1704. Closer to Mesmer's own time we find the sensationalist 1748 book L'homme Machine, by French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie. L'homme Machine was a reaction to Cartesian mind-body dualism, making La Mettrie one of the first to explicitly invoke the image of man-as-a-machine, denying the very existence of the soul. He said a rough battle with fever gave him the idea. When he regained consciousness, La Mettrie reckoned that the conscious experience was, in point of fact, nothing more than the product of a chemical balance (or imbalance) in his brain. No soul required. It really was as simple as that.

Popular outrage (by which I mean, outrage among the conservative, Catholic upper crust of eighteenth century France) at this materialist philosophy (even Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Baron D'Holbach covered their mouths with lacy, perfumed handkerchiefs in shock: “Man-as-machine, indeed! Hurrumph!”) forced La Mettrie to flee the country, because that's just how France worked in those days. He became court reader for King Fredric the Great of Prussia and (not coincidentally) had his work translated into German for any curious Viennese medical students to pick up.

Almost seventy years later, Dr. Mesmer set out to influence his patient's “tides,” to induce “artificial tides” by having patients drink a solution of iron and then attaching magnets to their bodies. Patients reported feeling streams of fluid move through them, providing hours of relaxation. Then, one day, he tried it without the magnets, only passing his hands over a patient. The effects remained constant. Mesmer had a eureka moment and declared that he'd discovered “animal magnetism.”

For three years he tried it out in Vienna. He'd sit across from a patient, their knees touching, gaze deeply into their eyes, and make passes with his hands. It was so weird someone had to invent a new verb to describe it. The man “mesmerized” you, and when he did, you experienced peculiar sensations. Or you went into convulsion. Either way, it was fine. Mesmer figured that blockages of the body's tides caused disease. Clearing the blockage with a little animal magnetism, rather than waiting around for the natural motions of the planets to do it, would produce a sudden “crisis” like convulsions. This was a sign of the healing process kicking into action, soon to be followed by a resolution, and the succession of all complaints.

Then, in 1777, Mesmer failed to cure a cute little blind girl—a musician named Maria Theresa von Paradis, and Maria just so happened to be the daughter of the Hapsburg Empire's Imperial Secretary of Commerce. Branded a failure by some very powerful people, Mesmer figured it was as good a time as any to move to France.

He set up shop in Paris, practicing on the sly, since neither the Royal Academy or the Society of Medicine would answer his letters. Still, by the end of three years he was so popular he started treating people en masse, “magnetizing” whole bathtubs full of water, and having fully clothed ladies climb in, the better the pass his hands over them. Or even better: have patients pass their hands over each other, since animal magnetism was an innate property of the human body. The thighs were, apparently, a particularly sensitive area. Mesmer taught protegees and established clinics in major cities.

Four years of this was more than enough to draw the attention of Louis XVI, who offered Mesmer a pension for life if he'd promise to remain in France and allow a royal commission to verify his claims. Mesmer refused, and King Louis finally directed the Royal Academy of Medicine to look into this impudent Austrian, who'd become the talk of all the salons. Nobles and ministers were getting “mesmerized,” and God only knew what they were doing to each other with their animal magnatism. His Most Catholic Majesty wanted to find out.

The Academy appointed people like Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who's name you should recognize, to investigate. They ruled Mesmer a fraud, which meant King Louis did as well, forcing Mesmer back to Austria in 1780. Private benefactors raised three hundred fifty thousand louis in the wake of Mesmer's departure, and he returned to France in triumph, a celebrity of his class and day. He remained in Paris until 1784, and being banished from Austria after showing up the last time, settled in the German university town now called Konstanz. There he died comfortable and famous in 1815. So famous he turned down an invitation from the King of Prussia to build a school in Berlin. But his ideas lived on. The King sent a doctoral student to learn Mesmer's trade, and Mesmer never seemed to turn down a chance to teach his techniques to others. He encouraged his students to spread the knowledge he'd gained, ensuring French and German doctors and aristocrats would carry right on mesmerizing patients and volunteers well into the nineteenth century.

Chief among these was Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur. One day, Puységur tried to magnetize a young peasant named Victor Race by stroking race's head. Race fell asleep and remained insensate when shaken. Puységur commanded him to stand, and was surprised as anyone when Race obeyed, still apparently in his trance-like state. He would obey any command Puységur shouted to him, and have no memory of the experience upon waking. Puységur called this "spasmotic sleep" or "artificial sleepwalking". Today we know it as "hypnotic induction," though it would take twenty years for anyone to invent the term "hypnosis."

In the meantime, John Locke's England prospered. The Anglican God still held high place there, and philosophers were fine to have Him. After all, He gave us these gifts of reason and our senses, and He gave us the Bible and Nature to study as we will. He also granted us, if we were English, through His infinite grace, a monarchy and a church leadership all-too happy to use the new science—a science of Newton and Locke and Sir Francis Bacon and James Watt—to their advantage. A science that would go on to transform Britain from an island of rustic seafarers into a worldwide, industrial Empire, the world's first. A science anyone, if they properly trained their five senses and their reason, could participate in, because Newton and Bacon and Locke had specifically designed it that way.

In this spirit of free and open scientific inquiry, middle-class dilettantes began toying around with any thing they could get their hands on. A few, beginning in the 1780s, grabbed on the hot new thing from France: mesmerism. Sure, the French Royal Academy said Mesmer was fraud, but what did those effete coffee-drinkers know about science? Hard-headed Englishmen (and -women) were expected to justify their beliefs through experience, and what better kind of a experience than a scientific one? After all, wasn't that what God expected of us, as proper English citizens? Besides, it's not like the Church or the state had any interested in policing the scientific inquiry of anyone.

In France, on the other hand, thinking too much could catch you quite a bit of flack from both church and state. Ask La Mettrie. Ask Mesmer. In France, these institutions were so powerful, and so intimately aligned, that they had no need to establish and support and new, separate, scientifically-minded class of intellectuals. Sure, you could invite them to the salons, wind them up with a little Spanish wine, and let them blather on about education, or social justice, or natural man, or whatever, and it was all good fun. But if they got too loud, or too embarrassing, with their calls for natural rights, it was better to throw them into prison, or exile, than anything else.

How much these ideas—the mathematical universe run by the watchmaker God—filtered down through the natural philosophers and the leaders of revolutions to the level of ordinary citizens, is debatable. The religious character of the eighteenth century is not. The old conflicts between reason and faith continued through wars and revolutions that revealed the darker character of the Enlightenment to a very startled world. Like energy and matter, these conflicts are conserved in history, only changing their form as time goes on.

One Frenchman, Denis Diderot even discarded the idea of a providential God altogether in his 1749 essay Lettre sur les aveugles ("Letter on the Blind"). Published anonymously, it was immediately censored by the authorities, its author arrested and tossed into the dungeon at Vincennes. After three months in prison, Diderot signed an agreement never to publish anything critical of religion every again. Instead, he spent twenty years attempting to collect all human knowledge in his Encyclopedie, causing great controversy - particularly with its evenhanded views on Protestantism, natural rights, and Catholicism. Officially banned by royal decree, it never made its editor rich, or even comfortable. When forced to sell his personal library, Catherine the Great of Russia offered to buy it, and paid him a yearly salary to keep it safe for her in Paris until such time as she had the need to read. Diderot used the money to pay for his daughter's dowry.

Thanks to these, and similar, life-stories the French Enlightenment divorced itself from both King and Church. Neither offered it any safe harbors, so it threw in (or was dragged in, depending upon whom you ask) with the radicals and the agitators. England managed to ship most of those over to its colonies—to their eventual chagrin. France had exactly the opposite policy, to their eventual downfall. Thus, revolution, and the problem of revolutionaries since time immemorial: now what to do?

If you believe, as John Locke and Voltaire did, that human beings are rational creatures governed by the rational laws of a rational universe—laws that ensure human beings will do everything they can to preserve themselves by maximizing pleasure and avoid pain—then you erect a rational society without those prideful, backward-looking institutions like the Church or the Monarchy, which only retarded human beings “natural morality” anyway. You reform the calender to do away with all the religious trappings stamped into it. You reform education based on Rousseau's Emile. And you suggest the idea for the guillotine in order to kill all those agents of the old society as humanely as possible. After all, the guillotine was a rational alternative to hanging, or burning, or a man with an ax who's arm often got tired, ensuring he'd need three or four whacks to do a proper job. It also became the symbol of a bloodthirsty, self-destructive regime that transcended everyone's worst expectations and set the pattern for revolutions until the early twentieth century.

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars it triggered convinced Europe's conservative elites that the Enlightenment project (as it was not yet known) was a morally-bankrupt one, leading inexorably to worse tyrannies than any monarch could imagine. With no God to appeal to, the rational State, and the society it created, assumed His place in the minds, hearts, and mouths of the Revolutionary leaders. Leaders who were, as far as those who lived through that time were concerned, nothing more than a collection of hypocritical power-seekers who appealed to the State the same way clergymen appeal to God. Because if you know the Truth, the absolute, mechanical Truth, of how the universe works, you can justify all sorts of atrocities. Theocratic dictators from Augustus Cesar to Stalin to Hitler know this in their bones. So does every leader worth his or her salt. As one of George Orwell's characters said, over a century later,“He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.”

Fort Hood: Mr. Self-Destruct

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

--Popular verse, seventeenth century England.

By now you've all know that poem, and you've all heard of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who staged his own Gunpowder Treason yesterday at the Ft. Hood, Texas, Soldier Readiness Center, killing thirteen and wounding thirty, including the police office who eventually stopped him, Sgt. Kimberly Munley. All but two of the wounded are out of the hospital, according to USA Today. Major Hasan remains in the coma Sgt. Munley put him, attached to a ventilator at the Brook Medical Army Center in San Antonio, according to the Press Trust of India. (Nothing says the Brits once ruled our country like spelling “center” with that extra “e”).

It's difficult to write about one of these things as the reports come in. Our Glorious Leader has already warned us against jumping to conclusions. Mosques everywhere within the Empire are battening down the hatches, fearing reprisals from “mainstream” (no one dare call them “white”) Americans.

The New York Times reports:

When the shooting began, members of three units of Army reservists in the Combat Stress Control Detachments were inside a medical and services center at Fort Hood signing medical forms and getting last-minute vaccinations before they went overseas.

There is no evidence that Major Hasan singled out his fellow combat stress counselors, but an Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said Major Hasan had been scheduled to deploy with the three Reserve units.

Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who owned a restaurant in Roanoke, VA, graduated with honors from Virginia Tech in 1995. He joined the service, got his commission, and received his medical degree from Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, in 2003, just in time to serve his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He became a psychological counselor for wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, and stayed on until July of this year, when he transferred to Ft. Hood, the largest military base in the world.

Sometime in August, Hasan legally purchased two FN Herstal Tactical Five-seveN pistols from Guns Galore, a self-evidently-named gunshop in Killeen, Texas, the town Ft. Hood supports. FN Herstal's website describes the Five-seveN (which comes “NATO Recommended”) as “Well balanced, with smooth contours and no protruding parts,” needlessly insisting that it “will instinctively be handled correctly and is extremely easy to use.”

All the classic hallmarks of a public murder rampage are present in the absolute deluge of press accounts (15000 in Google News alone). The initial rumors of four, five, six shooters (no doubt all part of a secret Muslim plot to allow President Obama to take away our guns). The (attempted) suicide by cop. The terse statements of local authority figures. The rush to exploit tragedy by national ones. The fetishistization of the victims. The shocked insistence by co-workers, neighbors, family members and community religious leaders that Hasan was a dedicated professional, a quite man who turned to religion for solace after his parent's deaths in 1998 and 2001, attended Friday prayers in uniform, and toured his apartment building days before his rampage giving away personal belongings.

The standard, disingenuous “Why?” is already under debate on comment boards and talking head shows across the media landscape. As NPR noted in their own, alright-but-not-great report, two narratives are emerging: Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-Muslim-extremist and Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-PTSD-psychologist. Lost in the babel is any stable picture of Maj. Hasan-the-dedicated-professional who was “performing quite well” according to Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center, Ft. Hood's hospital. At the bottom of a sudden media dogpile, Col. Kesling is already rushing to distance herself from Hasan. “You would hope you never know someone who would have such a demon.”

S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, came close to asking an impertinent question of USA Today (they being too chicken to ask it themselves):

“You're entitled to ask, was he moved to Fort Hood because he wasn't doing well at Walter Reed and they thought the fresh start would help?' " he said.

“Talking to people who knew him," Casscells said, "no one thinks that this was (post traumatic stress), and they are skeptical that he was subject to religious harassment.”

“That is not tolerated in the military. The military will look at all this closely and decide if there is any mental or physical illness, whether this is just a lonely guy with a remote personality who got a bad officer evaluation report and lost the confidence of his peers, maybe withdrew into religion as solace. What could we have missed? How could we do better?”

Every one seems to be missing the fact that, less than three years ago, Walter Reed was synonymous with bureaucratic inefficiency, crumbling infrastructure, criminally-neglectful mistreatment of patients, and the complicity of top brass in concealing all of the above. Two and half years can seem like a lifetime in America, but thanks to the internet, yesterday becomes today. Or March 1, 2007, as the case may be. That was the day the Washington Post reported:

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Lt. Gen. Kiley resigned from his position as Army Surgeon General eleven days after that story saw print. The day after, March 2, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA's 30th) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Major General George Weightman, the man who replaced Kiley as Walter Reed's commander (and was himself temporarily replaced by Kiley after being relieved of command on March 1, 2007). In the letter, Waxman informed Gen. Weightman to prepare himself for questions regarding an internal Army memo that fell into the Committee's hands. Written by Walter Reed Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi in September, 2006.

The memo (titled: “Challenges Concerning the Base Operations A-76 Study and resulting Reduction in Force (RIF) at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC)”) details the sad story of life inside Walter Reed from its worker's perspective. “It appears that over the past six years,” Waxman wrote,

the Defense Department has been engaged in a systematic effort to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for a host of functions, including facilities management, patient care, and even guard post duty entrance. This effort occurred under the A-76 process, which is shorthand for OMB Circular A-76.

The A-76 process was an element of Vice President Gore's reinventing government initiative. The idea behind A-76 is to force federal employees to compete with the private sector for the jobs being performed by the federal employees.

Then Florida happened, and Our (former) Glorious Leader, George W. Bush, ramped A-76 up full blast under the newly-rebranded rubric of “competitive sourcing initiatives,” opening up federal jobs of all stripes to private contractors. Like IAP Worldwide Services.

IAP Worldwide Services is a private company owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm (a company that owns other companies) chaired by Bush-era Treasury Secretary John Snow. Former Kellogg Brown and Ruth operating officer Al Neffgen holds the chief executive post and ex-KBR VP Dave Swindle (couldn't make that name up if you tried) holds the company president's chair. IAP would go on to achieve infamy in 2005 for it's bungled, over-priced attempts to deliver ice to Hurricane Katrina victims.

But back to Waxman's story:

In September 2004, the Army determined that the in-house federal workforce at Walter Reed could perform support services at Walter Reed at a lower cost than the bid received from IAP Worldwide Services. IAP protested this determination. As a result of the protest, the Army Audit Agency was directed [by whom? Waxman doesn't say - D] to reevaluate the bid from the federal employees. It has been reported that the Army Audit Agency withdrew its certification of the employee bid and unilaterally raised the bid by $7 million, thereby making the employee bid higher than the contractor bid. The Army then reversed its determination and resolved the A-76 process in favor of IAP.

When the employees sought to appeal this ruling, they were not allowed to make their case. Alan King, the Deputy Garrison Commander at Walter Reed, filed a protest of the contract award with GAO, but under the A-76 rules in place at the time, federal employees had no standing to object to A-76 determinations. Consequently, there was no similar cost review of the IAP bid proposal.

By January, 2006, IAP received a five-year, $120 million contract from Walter Reed, with the transition from in-house to out-sourced scheduled to being in January of '07. That year must've seemed a year of absolute hell as skilled government employees, including “skilled maintenance personnel and workers with specific knowledge of Walter Reed's systems and infrastructure,” left Walter Reed in droves, rather than wait for the inevitable round of lay-offs and replacements. By January, 2007, a trickle of twos and threes – an early retirement here, a change in position there – had become a flood, leaving Walter Reed with one-sixth of its original support staff workforce – maybe 60 people, out of an original 300. IAP fired those sixty and replaced them with fifty of their own people on February 3 when it took over management of the facility, but that was a little more than a panacea. Not even too little, too late. These were Dark Times at Walter Reed, when already-stressed infrastructure crumbled under incompetent new management and someone began to shoot his or her mouth off to the Washington Post about the mold on walls, the roaches, and the injured soldiers pulling self-assigned “guard duty” shifts, chasing away the neighborhood drug dealers working nearby street corners.

And is that a brown-skinned, thirty-something Major in a smock we see, making his rounds through all this chaos? Visiting soldiers no longer physically capable of visiting his office (assuming he still has one): men and women with missing arms, legs and faces living in darkness their own filth because the people who fix the lights and change the bedsheets are AWOL this week. Or this month. Imagine you're a young doctor, hot out of med school, interning at a place with a famous name, and all you want is to help soldiers with minds and bodies ground up by the grist mill of war. It'd be like getting up and going to hell every morning. Reports that Hasan received a bad performance review at Walter Reed (if true) should come as no surprise at all. Could you spend years at Walter Reed listening to soldier's stories? Could you then pick up and move to Texas? How is Texas a “fresh” start?

As Mark Ames has already noted (in a much better article than this one) Ft. Hood is no Disneyland.

For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — 685 so far — and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone — the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over.

In 1991, George Hennard Jr. killed twenty-three people at a local diner after driving his pickup through the wall, the deadliest rampage in American history...until Seung-Hui Cho shot up Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.

Our hearts go with the citizens of Killeen and the families of all the victims. We owe it to them to understand why these things happen, in the hope (infinitesimal as it may seem) of preventing them from ever happening again. Understanding will be impossible as long as we engage in the process of separating victim from villain with a hard, fast line, and tossing epithets like "crazy" and "terrorist" around...as if we all agreed on their meaning. There is a deep malaise eating at the heart of our country, our culture and (I would argue) our civilization itself. Maj. Hasan is neither the first nor the most violent mass murderer of our history. Not even in the year-to-date.

On March 10, Michael Kenneth McLendon, a former police officer (who, like Hasan, "didn't last"), killed his mother, set her house on fire, and cut a bloody swath of mayhem across two south Georgia counties, Coffee and Geneva. Mad Mike killing ten people before turning the gun on himself in the parking lot of Reliable Metal Products, a factory where he'd once worked.

March 24: Convicted felon, Lovelle Mixon kills four Oakland police officers: two with an SKS, two with an AK-47.

April 4: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania resident Richard Poplawski used a bullet-proof vest, a .22 rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and...an AK-47...to hold off the Pittsburgh police for four hours, killing three officers.

April 30: Jiverly Antares Wong (or Voong) killed thirteen people at a Binghamton, New York American Civic Association center before turning the gun on himself (beating out Hasan on the sociopathic scoreboard).

June 10: James Wenneker von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington and shoot a security guard.

August 4: George Sodini shoot three women at an LA Fitness in Collier Township, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, before turning the gun on himself.

And, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

New Review: Diary of the Dead (2007)

Over at AYTIWS, we honor The Month of the Living Dead with:



Diary of the Dead (2007)

Godzilla the Series: An Exercise in Over-analysis (Part IX)

(Back by popular demand, it's) Episode 10: Bird of Paradise

Inside the sweaty jungles of what the title card tells us is the Yucatan, a red-headed backpacker finds himself face to face with an Aztec pyramid, built into the side of a volcano. “There you are,” he says, as if greeting an old friend. Inside the pyramid, our Dollar Store Indiana Jones discovers a secret passage into the volcano's crater, complete with sacrificial alter and emerald-eyed bird statue. Because pre-Columbian Aztec engineers were just that cool, touching said statue makes the emerald eye glow and sets off a small eruption. A screaming, red shape escapes from the resulting blast of lava and noxious fumes. Cue credits.

Meanwhile, back at H.E.A.T. Headquarters, all's right with the world. Godzilla's eating fish, Dr. Nick's making notes, and Randy continues to labor under the delusion that he's funny. Dr. Elsie Chapman and DGSE Agent Monique Dupre are caught up in that great American pastime: watching television. (Some scientists you all turned to be.) Good thing, too. Otherwise they might never have learned about the, “mysterious wave of destruction sweeping across southern Mexico.”

Enter Dr. Mendel Craven, with a timely phone call for Elsie “from a Lawrence Cohen.” The mere mention of his name is enough to make Elsie put on her constipated face. “He sounds pretty upset. Something about Mexico.”

That “something” amounts to a ruined small town filled with uncommunicative eyewitnesses. Monique quires Elsie on the status of their contact: “I thought your boyfriend was going to meet us?” “Lawrence was never my boyfriend,” Elsie insists. “Just someone I...knew...a long time ago.” Larry (voiced by Tate Donnovan, who played TV's Disney's Hercules for all of one season, the show's entire run) is also an ornithologist. And by “knew...a long time ago,” she meant “almost married.” The team's collective reaction to this is priceless. (Much better the show's Running Gag of the Week, involving Mendel and spicy foot.)

“Someone's work,” Elsie insists, “kept getting in the way.” But why quibble about the past? It's not like there are any other, better ways to flesh out Elsie's character. Off to the pyramid, and its volcanic home, “the resting place of Quetzalcoatl,” Larry informs us, “an ancient symbol of creation. His appearance signaled a bountiful harvest.” (Well...that's kinda right. Like sun gods from Atum to Jesus, the Feathered Serpent represented knowledge, civilizing forces, and the eternal cycle of creation we puny mortals perceive as the phenomenological universe...but who cares about accuracy, right Larry? It's not like you're a scientist or anything.) “No one can describe it. Q usually hides itself in the glare of the sun...I think that when I unsealed the temple, I may have released Quetzalcoatl.”

Indeed you did, Larry. Here it comes now. And you didn't even manage to get a picture of it. With the camera. Around your neck. Instead, you fuck around with the camera while the giant, fire-breathing bird attacks you and the hapless crew you lured into its lair. Frankly, my boy, I'd leave you at the alter, too. And since Randy's discovery of a Quetzalcoatl feather typifies much of what's wrong with this episode we'll only mention it here, with promises to revisit it.

First we deal with Elsie's righteous indignation at her former-fiance...which only lasts as long as the next scene. Turns out Larry's been slaving away at proving a direct evolutionary link between dinosaurs and modern birds. Q could be the culmination of that work, in living color and complete with dragon breath. Ironic, then, that this is the “work” responsible for downing their relationship, especially since it was probably what brought them together in the first place, Elsie being a paleontologist and all.

Well, it turns out all is not for naught. Elsie extends Larry a glance down the microscope by way of a peace offering. Seems the feather Randy found is really a scale, covered with enough silicate for the flying lizard to survive a five hundred year nap in the interior of a volcano. Dr. Nick bursts in at their most perfect moment together, to Elsie's consternation. “We were looking at a...science-thingy,” she stammers. Nick doesn't even blink. Is he enjoy this after all the crap Dr. Chapman's given him over his choice of romantic leads? I know I would be. In any case, clock's ticking. Time to saddle up for the third act. Q's attacking another small town. Its apparent invulnerability to tranquilizers necessitates some on-the-spot chemistry utilizing the venom of some local scorpions—Black Scorpions (har har). Nick warns Monique “We only have enough for one shot.” Because catching any more bugs would just be a chore. “Then,” she says with characteristic, French aplomb, “I will make it count.”

Promises, promises. The situation in town prevents Monique from showing off her markswomanship. Panicked civilians (unlike the Mexican army) are everywhere, forcing Elsie and Dr. Nick to once again become action heroes. Elsie even rescues the stereotypical Stranded Baby from the middle of the road...and, as a reward, gets carried off in Q's super-sized talons, along with a good chunk of local real estate.

Now we've got our third act's Ticking Clock all wound and ready. Any real shows might've cut right to Elsie waking up call and spared us the painful Call to Arms/Expository speech H.E.A.T. stands around and delivers to itself amidst the wreckage. About how all of Q's previous attacks were little more than materials gathering expeditions. About how those materials have gone to form a nest for God-knows-how-many “baby Qs.” And about how Elsie's to become their first breakfast if the rest of the team doesn't move, move, move (as Dr. Nick says—interminably). Hey, I know: let's stand around yaking about it some more. Then Elsie's sure to get eaten alive.

Back to the volcano, where Elsie is indeed being menaced by creepy, big-headed, plucked-chicken versions of Q. Big Mama Q, meanwhile, circles the volcano, making H.E.A.T.'s ascent hell. Desperation forces Nick to call in the team's not-so-secret weapon. Props to Larry for not even blinking when Nick gives the order to, “Signal Godzilla.” That's focus. After all, there's a redhead to save. Who has time to notice that Elsie's boss appears to have a thirty-story, atomic-powered engine of destruction at his beck and call?

Not Larry. While Godzilla and Q duke it out downslope, he rigs up a cable from the shattered bits of N.I.G.E.L. the Doomed Robot. Repelling into Q's nest, he joins Elsie in a frantic but not-too-tense chase scene before being rescued himself by the rest of H.E.A.T. Drawn by the desperate squeeks of her progeny, Q returns to the nest, no doubt eager to roast up the human morsels skittering around its edge. Godzilla, thankfully, has other ideas. Once again displaying the kind of higher-order thinking that would give me pause, were I a Scientist, he not only shoulder-checks Q back into the volcano's crater but proceeds to seal it, and Q, and her featherless babes (who we can assume die in the resulting avalance), up with a blast of his atomic breath. A collective cheer goes up from our human heroes and its time for the coda, wherein Elsie decides, even after all his heroics, that Larry is “still for the birds.”

This episode is a giant in-joke, designed specifically for fools like me, who spent our childhoods so desperate for a giant monster movie fix we watch anything even vaguely resembling a Godzilla movie. The concept, execution, and even the design of Q is a self-conscious throwback to 1982's Q: The Winged Serpent, a forgettable piece of fluff written and directed by (drumroll, please)...Lawrence Cohen. Larry Cohen (whom my colleague, Dr. Freex, characterized as “a Great White Hope” of the 70s and 80s) is a seminal Bad Movie maker, most famous for his Mutant Baby trilogy of It's Alive flicks. He also made the cinematic let-down God Told Me To (though any movie that features Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop can't be all bad), and the much-better, anti-consumer-culture horror flick The Stuff. But it's Q that concerns us here because, for all its low budget weirdness (mimes with guns, anyone?), Cohen's second attempt to discuss religion with the grammar of horror movies sticks in my head much more effectively than his first.

Q starred Richard “Shaft” Roundtree and David “Kwai Chang Caine” Carradine as a pair of cynical NYPD detectives with an unusual rash of disappearances and dismembered bodies on their hands. After about an hour of fruitless investigation, they discover a cult of New Wave Aztecs have made the unusually-stupid mistake of resurrecting the god Quetzalcoatl through sacrifice and prayer. Without so much as a “Thanks, dipshits,” Q proceeded to build a nest in the cone of the Chrysler Building and started thinning out New York's herd of window washers and rooftop sunbathers. The machine guns of the NYPD shuffle it off this mortal coil and (after the obligatory twist ending) the credits rolled. The End.

Unfortunately, only those who know all of the above will get any kind of kick from this episode. Unlike it, the movie Q had enough time on its hands for actual character development. At best, the character of Larry Cohen presented here is little more than a walking in-joke, with no real role to play in the proceedings. We know Dr. Nick can play action hero when he has to, and all Larry does is reduce Nick's opportunities to do so. Larry's presence necessitates that he contribute something to justify his presence and redeem himself for letting Q out in the first place. Too bad Larry never does anything unexpected. The final coda (wherein Larry breaks off a conversation with Elsie to photograph a Peruvian finch) proves that Larry's learned absolutely zilch from the whole experience. I hope the Mexican government gets wind of all this somehow and sues his Wrangler-clad ass into Chapter Eleven for all the collateral damage.

The entire episode suffers from the lack of a punchline. Had Larry proved willing to sacrifice Elsie to the very imminent god-monster he'd just woken up (out of some benighted hope of controlling Q, say, and getting revenge on all those stuffy academics who ridiculed his research)...had the link between gods and monsters, and the frequent trouble humans have telling the difference, actually come under discussion...had Godzilla not been consigned to clean-up detail...I might have more good things to say about Bird of Paradise. As it is, this episode remains another low point for Godzilla's first season. Poorly written by Neil Ruttenberg (writer of such classics as Deathstalker II and Prehysteria III), it's in-jokes are appreciated (“Black Scorpion,” indeed), but they cannot support an episode all by themselves.

Things just go too fast for their own good here. Randy's discovery of the feather is a perfect example. No sooner does he say, "Hey, check this out," then it's time for the first Q attack. Blink, and you'll be mighty confused about just where that feather came from. With twenty-odd minutes of action-packed show to fill, I'm not surprised to see character development thrown overboard. But I am shocked at how much the plot is truncated to make room for itself. There are too many things going on here: Elsie's relationship with Larry; Elsie's relationship with the rest of the team; Dr. Craven's adventures with real-by-God Mexican food; Larry's relationship to H.E.A.T. (which never gets past "cordial")...it goes on.

The point being, this is a treatment, not a script, and there's enough stuff here for half again as much screen time. If only this had been a two-parter. If only Larry had something real to do. Anybody can rescue Elsie. With Monique being French and three other male leads available (all of whom appear in the weekly credit sequence), Larry starts in fifth place and never moves up the pack. The episode suffers because of that, and usual lack of its titular star.

But I've bitched about that often enough. I think Winter of Our Discontent spoiled me mightily. But there'll be plenty of time for that next week, when we go down south. And Freeze.

What Anti-War Movement?

Via Democracy Now: "It has now been eight years since 9/11. The United States is still engaged in Iraq and is escalating its wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan with no end in site. Speaking at the Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side in New York, Arun Gupta, a founding Editor of The Indypendent, takes a critical look at the failures and future of the once massive anti-war movement."

It's Official

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

Via the MySpace distraction What Tarot Card are You?):

"The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing."

A significantly more upbeat interpretation than the one on Wikipedia.

The Hermit is related through a cross sum (the sum of the digits) to The Moon. While The Hermit mostly integrates the lessons of the sunlit world, the Moon stands at the threshold of light and dark and churns the waters of life. In both cases, treasures can be uncovered through contemplation of what is brought forth. In both cases, monsters may be found.

Some say that The Hermit is a Threshold Guardian, representing an obstacle the Querent, the hero of the piece, must overcome to move on.

A potentially dangerous aspect of The Hermit is his retreat, his isolation. We all need to retreat sometimes; retreat and renewal are necessary for growth. But The Hermit may be tempted to completely withdraw from the world, not because the journey is done, but because the dragons of the real are too daunting, or because the trivial pleasures of the cave are too intoxicating. Withdraw at the wrong time, stay withdrawn too long, and growth stops.

The cowl The Hermit wears protects him and isolates him. Hopefully, at some point, he casts it off and rejoins the world.

Some say that The Hermit represents the time we learn our true names; who we really are. The Greek philosopher Thales is reported to have been asked, “What is the most difficult of all things?” To which he is said to have answered “To know yourself.” The Hermit is given time to obey the Delphic Oracle’s demand: know thyself.

So you're saying I should just go on doing what I'm doing? Thanks. That's Tarot cards, ladies and gentlemen: reinforcing your worldview since the 5,000 B.C....though I'm sure some Wikipedia dick would tag that last "citation needed."

Florida Raises Man-Eating Snake Alert Level to "Muthafucker!"

Via ABC: Muthafuckin' snakes!

Now if only those giant, man-eating cormorants would get off their fucking asses and put the fear of God back into the "great" state of South Carolina.

New Review: Hulk Vs. (2009)

Hulk Vs. (2009) - Marvel and Lions Gate attempt to tide us over between blockbusters by throwing us two animated bones for the price of one.

Wordslinger

Special Announcement:

I'm proud to contribute my 2005 Evil Time Traveler story The Final Voyage of Carl Denning, 1609 to issue #2 of the ezine Death's Head Grin. Read, browse, and lend your support to any- and everyone who's made it their business to publish stories.

Marcus Brigstocke: British People Are Naturally Funnier

Thanks To (and shamless plugs for) Joseph Lieberman

The author of School Shootings took the time to answer a few of questions today. Details to follow. In the meantime, I'd just like to say we met at SE Portland's premier hole-in-the-wall, wi-fi/coffee bar, The Funky Door. (Give them money.)

But sheer coincidence, August 1, 2009 is the 43rd anniversary of Charles Joseph Whitman's attack on the University of Texas, Austin...a fact (believe it or not) I didn't even realize until just this moment.

Things went off without a hitch thanks to the vast improvements in microphone technology the CIA's seen fit to show us (I kid the CIA--we're really very close, they and I. No, not really.) I tremble at the thought of what Macaulay Culkin might've accomplished back in 1990 with the aid of my little Sansa. In fact, the damn thing worked so well I can hear just about everything in the room. So the quest begins for a good freeware sound mixer. In the ultimate scenario, the mix will bring Joe's answers into the clear while completely eliminating any

Thankfully, my subject was a professional. So much so that most of his answers come complete with their own paragraph-breaks. Expect a transcript and new movie review this week...just don't quote me on that. The Dog Days are almost here, and it's only getting hotter.

Take care of each other.

Fox News Graphics Department Makes Captioning Unnecessary

From The Live Desk, July 27, 2009, via Media Matters.

Health Scare