The Half-Assed, Trillion Dollar Proposal

I see one of my Congresspeople, David Wu (D-OR1) is teaming up with a Yale law professor named Bruce Akerman to propose another Way Forward in Iraq. Far from the non-binding resolutions proposed by Congressman Wu’s dickless wonder-colleagues in the Senate, the two’s plan calls for an actual act of Congress…thought not one, it should be noted, that a majority in either House of Congress is willing to support, despite overwhelming evidence that the continued occupation of Iraq is quickly growing as unpopular at home as it has always been abroad.

So call the Wu/Akerman plan “starving the fire.” They call it the "Half-Trillion Dollar Solution." How about calling it the “just one more cigarette” solution. Basically (they write in the American Prospect) Congress will give Our Glorious Leader an ultimatum:

It is Congress's job to restore fiscal balance first, by placing an overall limit on Iraq war expenditures. Congress should limit this president to spending half a trillion dollars on the Iraq war -- and no more.... [T]he president would have no choice but to sign this ceiling to get short-term funding for his war.

You hear that? A half a trillion and no more. Just one more half trillion dollars and no more. Nada. Zip. That is it young man, no more. And when we go to the lake you are to have no dance party. God if I catch you in our wallet again I swear I will snatch the black right off of you.

How absurd it is that we are still debating this. How absurd that my Congressman actually believes Our Glorious Leader will do the sane, rational thing and Bring the Boys Back Home before the money runs out. Because if there’s one man in this country known for sanity and reason his name is George W. Bush.

The Iraq War (I still prefer the Daily Show’s “Mess o’potamia”) will go down in history as the first Ignored War of the twenty-first century. It might as well be taking place on the moon for all the effect it’s had on America’s national shameless march into obese, drug dependent, indolence and work-related injuries. I swear…never has living in an imperialistic superpower felt so…disappointed. We’ve reaped no rewards from this fiasco, and done horrible evil to a people most of us refuse to believe exist. No destiny manifested itself in the Iraqi’s sands; we’re carving that out now with blood and ammo. There are no gods left on our side (unless you count Pat Robertson’s) and we can all see what’s going on for ourselves if only we are willing to look, read and listen. The Iraq War will also go down in history as one of the best documented bits of blood shed in history.

Yet we still manage to go through our day. The peace protests have dwindled, the marchers have dispersed, the glass windows remain unbroken and most of us are just trying to get through the day. War is…gross. It’s hard to watch. It’s harder to go through, after all…part of the reason we’re here and not over there, enjoying the triple digit heat and the roving hoards of bullets.

More likely Our Glorious Leader will decide to let the troops stay right where they are. He’s already hinted that “finishing the job” will be the work of a President who’s name isn’t his. Perhaps he plans to leave the whole damn thing to Jeb, a final Frat prank from older brother to younger. In any case, don’t believe for a second he values the lives of “our troops.” He won’t hesitate to led their funding dry up and leave them stranded in hostile territory, their equipment falling apart, their meals riddled with parasites. As if he’s the first President to leave them so for short-sighted political gain. He’ll probably turn right around and shout, “You see? Those damn Democrats tied my hands. They left our troops balls up in the war zone before the job was done. So remember…vote Republican come November.” After all, he is still George W. Bush, and he still approves his own messages.

My Friend Friedrich

Nietzsche says a lot of things, most of them vain, which is only fitting. He has more balls than Ayn Rand and when he wrote Human, All Too Human in 1878 he had not yet succumb to his disciple’s kind of crazy. He never would, dying of an all too different crazy ten years later.

Unlike Beyond Good and Evil (the one with, “the abyss gazes also”) Human spends a lot of time one “artists,” mostly writers and musicians, reaching the eventual conclusion that “We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do.” In this it is much more hit and miss, and given to descend, sharply and critically, into the midst of nineteenth century bourgeoisie thinking. The next sentence reads: “Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to.”

Right. That’s why we “Christianized” all those savage Indians.

To be fair, Nietzsche never saw America. Would he have thought us a glorious experiment in observational evolution? Did we not carve society out of the “untrammeled wood,” imposing our will upon an entire landmass and mercilessly exterminating its natives, our rivals? Would we not exemplify all the best and worst that is his philosophy? None of Horace in Nietzsche’s talk of “artists.” None of this, “he tamed the beast within,” crap for our boy Friedrich…he would no doubt consider Art’s civilizing power a vestige of “slave morality.” No poets will form Nietzsche’s civilization. Art itself will wither and die the same death reserved for religion. After all, who ever survived with poem? Except Nietzsche.

“Soon the artist will be regarded as a wondrous relic, on whose strength and beauty the happiness of earlier times depended; honors will be shown him, such as we cannot grant to our own equals.”

The post-modernist in me fights the urge to grin as a writer criticizes other writers. In prose, no less. I snicker down at my friend Friedrich from my vaunted place atop his one hundred and seven year-old grave. I don’t to plan to go anywhere, old man, and neither do my brothers and sisters, in success or out. The world has always needed artists…as much, if not more, than it needs self-obsessed, German philosophers. Who are you, the man who would write Zarathustra, to say, “Art proceeds from man’s natural ignorance about his interior (in body and character): it is not for physicists or philosophers”?

I will admit, however, that my friend Friedrich gets some things right. He also spake, “Ostensibly [the artist] is fighting for the higher dignity and meaning of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, feeling for the symbolic, over estimation of the individual, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of his manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth in every form, however plain it ay appear.”

How nice it must to live in an age that still believed in “truth,” or that it might, at the very least, actually set you free.

Prefacial

It is possible, though highly improbable, to concoct a moral system based upon the actions of superheroes. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

It is possible to set out a systematic philosophy of ethical thought, observation, and behavior using nothing more than aphorisms composed of two-sentence thought-stems. Nor is that what I want to talk about. My roommate’s co-worker notice I’m reading Human, All Too Human and asks what it’s about. I tell him, “Philosophy,” and he tells me, “I didn’t know you were a philosophizer,” dragging the word through California sand like “Ted” Theodore Logan: “phil-os-o-phizer.”

“Dude,” I wondered, “you aren’t?” To me, it’s as if someone has announce they didn’t know I breathed oxygen/nitrogen/trace element mixture. At the same time, how could he have known? It’s not as if I’ve told him. Two years ago, when my ex-wife called me a philosopher I didn’t believe her. Philosophers have systems, books and fixed beliefs. I was a fool two years ago, and believe some foolish things. Now I’ve become quite acquainted with the fluidity of all things, shook hands with relativism and discovered that the universe is an uncertain chaos; that we really cannot know and what we know we can rarely tell given that we have slaved ourselves to the techno-fetishism of language. The Word Virus marches on, ever West…until it reaches East and bites its own tail like a jargon snake.

Was that what I wanted to talk about it? Not really, no. Really, all I wanted to do was get the juices flowing, get the ol’ synapse firing, and get ready for the real Work. I must find a way to finish a story and at last leave behind this inescapable feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.

Strange choice of words, that. “Supposed” to be. Strange. This is what happens when an impressionable writer reads William S. Burroughs. If I needed a defense, I would offer up the fact that we are both children of Missouri, and we both fled for the Big City as soon as we possibly could. Both of us found our pet addictions and enjoyed our unrequited romances…though if he weren’t dead I might feel sorry for old Bill. Alan Ginsberg sounds like a hard bastard to carry a torch for, like the kind of girl who’ll bring her new boyfriend over, the better to solicit your opinion, “as a friend.” What to do then, and remain “moral” (or, as Nietzsche might say, to remain in synch with one’s own will). My heart and love once again summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a happy ending; just not for you.” And this is most definitely not what I wanted to talk about.

But I’ve spent the week reading Naked Lunch and last night attended my best friend’s birthday party. The month of February is falling away from itself and I’m not closer to where I believe I should be. No closer to working my will upon the universe. My mind is a fragmented haze and I must get to Work soon. No choice to be had. I must learn to finish things.

Roars of Defiance

I may have made an oversight in my discussion of Kong. My girlfriend turned me on (ha-ha) to the possibility of such during a recent re-viewing of Peter Jackson’s Kong. “Any discussion,” she told me, as we watched the ape meet his death at the hands of the twentieth century, “should include something about that image. That one, right there: Kong standing on the top of the Empire State Building, the highest point in New York at the time—correct me if I’m wrong?

(She was not so I had no need to. It was, indeed, the highest point at the time of this picture’s progenitor (1933) and may, in fact, be so again today. As Kong climbed the spire and Peter Jackson chose to shift scenes to a wide angle, establishing shot of Central/Lower Manhattan I pointed to a piece of sky at the island’s southern tip and said, “Right there. In about forty years—from the time this picture’s set in—that’s where they’d be. Right there. That piece of sky. And thirty years after that…bang. Jericho’s walls came a-tumblin’ down. Walls, floors and ceilings.”)

“Okay,” she said. “The highest point in New York. The highest point in the world, right?” Indeed. The top of the world; just like the song that plays over Kong’s opening montage says. “Okay. So no discussion would be complete without that image of him, at dawn, on top of the world, beating his chest.”

As the bi-planes congealed themselves into strafing formation I saw exactly what she meant. “The King of the world he knew, who up ‘til now had toiled and battled in utter obscurity, escapes the captivity imposed upon him by the modern world and literally pulls himself up to a point where everyone must look up to him. They have no other choice. He’s reached the Absolute Height, and at dawn no less. Can’t get much more symbolic than that. The formerly obscure, the blackest of the black, this God of the fog jungles and 'the last blank space on the map' has surmounted the straight-line, ninety-degree-angled world of ‘civilization’ in the most ironically obvious of ways. The unknown, the ignored, makes himself impossible to ignore. So he has to die. We kill him.”

Legions of monsters have followed Kong’s example and his journey has become the formula slavishly followed by all who share his cinematic heritage. Even Godzilla, who in many ways remains Kong’s dipolar opposite (Kong is a “person”, Godzilla a “force”; Kong is mortal, Godzilla nigh-invulnerable; Kong is destroyed by a civilization that cannot accept him on any terms but the slave master’s, Godzilla, being nigh-invulnerable, has the power to set his own terms), began life as a God of unknown regions. Jungle, sea, the depths of space, or the frozen waists of an arctic ice berg: it makes no real difference in the final summation. The giant monster always propels itself (or is propelled, usually through short-sighted human actions) into a position of absolute prominence. The Deadly Mantis climbs the Washington Monument. The Locusts in The Beginning of the End blot out the skies over Chicago with the sheer size of their swarm. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms runs riot through Manhattan’s fish markets, its blood poisoning thousands, even those who escape its more direct attacks. And Godzilla, high father of them all, torches millions in a single night’s rampage, and returns to torch more, again and again, writing declarations of his own existence in the charred remains of entire cities.

I would counter my girlfriend’s statement with the idea that any giant monster discussion is incomplete without mention of these critical elements, these crucial events. In them, the monsters reveal their true motivations, rarely anything more complex than mere existence. These creatures do not want (in so much as they can “want” anything in any human sense) to participate the straight-edged world of the civilized. In many cases they could obviously care less that such a world even exists. The fact that it does, coupled with their stature, forces giant monsters everywhere to acknowledge it in one form or another, even if only with a roar of defiance or a casual blast of radioactive breath. This mutual acknowledgement, with its inherent antagonism, is at the heart of all these tales of terror and destruction. And while these may not be revolutionary realizations they may, in their own slow time, point the way to some that are, providing a much-needed skeleton key to my Finnegan’s Wake and allowing me to draw something positive from the countless amount of hours I have otherwise wasted on these fun but often frighteningly bad films.

The Ghost of Dian Fossey

Yesterday I received a rejection letter from Asimov’s. A form generated, Xerox copied, standard issue reply. A McNotice; their editorial staff did not lower themselves to signing it with a sig-stamp or a robopin, depriving their letter of the personal touch I characteristic of, say, F&SF’s rejection letters.

Easy enough to make out why I did not rate the robosignature. As Harlan Ellison reportedly said to the creator of Babylon 5, “Stop writing crap and you’ll start selling.”

Raised on the Novel I, spent the longest time balking at the Short Story, both as a medium and as a form. Too short, I thought, too base-board. To forgettable, to clichéd. Too O. Henry, and how I hated O. Henry. Bastard. Now I must pay for all this time spent in spite with time spent perfecting my personal achievements of the form; going through the same, slow process of experiment and expectation that’s allowed my Novel In Progress to swell to 30,000 words, with its end only barely in site.

I recognize the necessity of this learning process. The bricks of Rome rest on a bone yard of centuries and Robert Heinlein I am not. No contest winners on my hard drive, and I also recognize the fact that, in the process of writing everything but the Good Short Story, I’ve written myself an indeterminate sentence: twenty-five to Life in the Big House of Service Industry Economics. By day I look through my bars and dream of life on the Outside, where the toils of my class of worker are swallowed by the same visual background radiation that allows us to pass orange jumpsuited work groups as they trim brush along our highways.

Thankfully, my coworkers suspect nothing of my plans to consign them to nonentity oblivion. If they did I’d promise to make it up to them as best I could: by immortalizing their struggle for the wider world, preserving it in its own prison of abstract, symbolic representation.

I doubt that would cool them. This is why writers must remain anonymous. To be affective students of the human animal, we must allow ourselves to be possessed by the spirit of Goodall and Fossey and disappear into its midst.

Cubefarm, Act Two: Propagandistic Boogaloo

On Tuesday I get the memo. “There will be a mandatory meeting Saturday, 2/10/07, from 9 to 9:55 a.m. Please bring your Operations Manual.”

On Friday I check the bus schedule and for the millionth time I curse My Fair City’s public transit company. Where is Charles Foster Kane when I need him, and his oh-so yellow journalism, to protect me from Trimet Corp. and its pack of money grubbing pirates?

On Saturday I rise and catch the bus. I read Woman on the Edge of Time. My commute is ninety minutes of sit, stand, and wait. I put twenty-six pages to bed before I arrive.

Inside my coworkers are ranged around the desk. My manager allows himself the privilege of standing. He addresses us in a direct, unhesitant voice that is used to being listened to. A manager’s voice. His bald plate of a head glows in the overhead lights. He tells us that, in 2006, our call center processed seven hundred thousand two hundred and ninety-six tickets. I am supposed to be impressed.

We are told to meet quota in the upcoming busy season. We are told which door to exit through in case of a fire. We are told not to put our feet on our desks, chairs, power strips, or cubical walls. We are told the team who moved our furniture to its new location spent five hours cleaning the walls of our “pods,” and that it was “not fun.” We are told to clean up after ourselves. Candy bars may be eaten at our desks, but “messy” food is off limits. “We have a nice break room for all of you. Use it, alright?”

Nine o’clock becomes nine-fifteen becomes nine fifty-five. We’re told to hang our coats on coat wracks and sit quietly at our desks. I think of kindergarten. The rules were exactly the same in Mrs. Neatherton’s class and the only “pods” that concerned me were Seth Brundle’s telepods. I think back to my five year-old self, and the first time I watched David Croneberg’s The Fly. I think of Geena Davis literally knocking Jeff Goldblum’s block off.

“And remember,” our manager says, “whenever you press your ‘Mute’ button, what you say still goes on the recording. All your calls are recorded. The microphone is always on. And sometimes the board members are listening.”

We are, to him, giant five year-olds in need of constant supervision. That being impossible, the “adults” being busy with their own, oh-so important lives, our supervisory benefactors revert to their favorite default method of control: fear.

“Fear,” as Darth Maul once told us (in a line cut from the finished film, thank you very fucking much, literally cutting his spoken performance in half) “is the mind-killer. Fear is my weapon.” A certain “path to the dark side,” fear is also the most effect means of self-enforcement known to man…in any galaxy. Fearful individuals are too busy watching their own backs (or mouths, as the case may be) to ask questions, demand leniency, or feel patronized by jumped-up, self-important authority figures. They want us to worry about our every move. They want us cowed into a state of glassy-eyed stupidity. They need us to police ourselves because (as has been true throughout history) there are far more of us than there are of them, and their masters are all-too ready to subscribe to the same tactics.

Thus fear, like an avalanche, flows downward, always gathering force as it goes, leaving those of us down in the trenches of our modern, service economy to bear the brunt of its weight. Any good German (or good America) will tell you that the fearful are the most compliant and compliant parts allow the machinery to move all the more swiftly.

“Remember, the moment you come into work, you decide whether or not to have a good day. It’s your choice.” The only choice we, at the lowest levels, are allowed in view of all of the above. Do we accept the repetitive, mechanistic character of our work, which requires virtually none of our conscious attention? Do we ignore the fact that we are, daily, reduced to the level of component parts if a societal machine erected for no better purpose than to preserve a corporation’s private property at the behest of a government? Do we reject any grandiose delusions we might have that we are really creative, intuitive, rational, inventive, human individuals with individualized needs, beliefs, experiences or capacities? Do we ignore the fact that every one of our callers possesses all these traits as well? Do we merely sit and work, screaming in desperation behind the smiles frozen to our faces (“Remember: they can hear a smile in your voice”), unable, even, to sympathize with our fellow toilers for fear that some suit with visions of lawsuits dancing in his head might fire us because of an offhand remark?

We are meant to, yes, as to acknowledge the consciousness destroying quality of “work” (which “requires” so little “exertion of physical or mental effort” that I’m beginning to doubt its claim to the word, as defined by my copy of the Oxford) would render us incapable of performing it. The sheer absurdity of the situation would reduce us to giggling heaps, were we motivated by our own survival to maintain a facade of seriousness. Sometimes this happens to me, and I know now that my every bout of uncontrollable laughter survives, somewhere, sleeping next to every muttered curse, every offhand comment and every paranoid utterance.

However, my manager is right to say the choice remains in our hands. We could always chose to merely act as if we’ve made the choice. Turn these choices into a role, breathing new life into the Bard’s old world as we “performed” our working “lives” for an audience of “superiors”, remaining just sentient enough to play the role of obedient machines. The only danger in that was articulated by Nietzsche a century and a quarter ago, in one of his most over-used of quotes: Beyond Good and Evil’s Epigram and Interlude 146. All together now:

“Whosoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

Strange to hide that thought, of all places, amidst a page of unmitigated nineteenth century sexism.