Osama bin Luthor?

Simply a whimsy. Should Osama bin Laden be considered George W. Bush's Lex Luthor? Lex, as fans of Jerry Siegel will recall, was Superman's nemesis in the old DC Comics, a guy who once had noble aspirations, as a young mad scientist in Smallville, but then went off the rails when Superboy accidentally blew up one of his inventions, rendering Lex prematurely and permanently bald and earning Superman the life-long enmity of Luthor, who became an arch-villain dedicated to destroying Superman by any means necessary. Lex's bitterness led him to increasingly complicated and bizarre strategems for killing the Man of Steeel, including synthesizing Kryptonite and devising his own battle-suit (purple and green) which gave him some, but not enough, superpowers of his own. An over-reaction, to be sure; why not simply a toupee or allographic transplant (I realize Lex had no side hair to work with). Superboy's mistake was understandable, after all, and the Boy of Steel lacked Lex's intellectual brilliance. As Jerry Seinfeld, noted Superman fan once joked, Siegel actually portrayed Superman as kind of a yutz, despite his Kryptonite parents with the Hebrew names. It's why, to the everlasting shame of Jor-El and Lara, Kal-El went into physical work and never became the brain surgeon they hoped.

But I stray from the point, perhaps because there are an amazing number of websites devoted to Superman trivia. Osama as George W. Bush's nemesis, along Luthor/Superman lines, is something of a stretch for a number of reasons. Osama perhaps fits the bill better than Bush, although W is unquestionably something of a yutz himself. But the rivalry just seems a little one-sided, when you think about it. As those swimming in adjacent lanes here on the Pond know, I am not one of those haughty Bush-is-dumb critics. I hold firmly to the view that Bush is somewhat better than a mediocrity, and I will defend Bush's intellectual prowess with all the vehemence that such a tepid view commands. I will murmur from the rooftops, in other words, that Bush is a little better than so-so when it comes to thinking and analysis. In the pantheon of super heroes, Bush proudly takes his place as MediocreMan. Take that! you needling Leftist pundits!

But, in all intellectual honesty -- is MediocreMan as clever as Lex Osama? Bush has the Pentagon to support his side, a vast array of power rivaling even the Man of Steel's armamentarium. Surely the U.S. military has things faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. OBL has a camel and a laptop, which he can't use for anything other than video games or we'll pinpoint his location. Certainly, then, we have asymmetrical warfare on our hands.

To make it a fight, Osama has used manipulation. He can't fight the hated, decadent West by direct military means, or he'll be wiped out in an instant. His strategy, therefore, has been to provoke the United States into self-destructive acts of retribution, counting on the knee-jerk, play-to-the-uneducated-masses style of America's prep-school cowboy, MediocreMan himself. Bin Laden arranged for the assassination of Ahmed Massoud, the Afghan anti-Taliban leader, on September 9, 2001, using Qaeda soldiers posing as journalists. No doubt it was OBL who orchestrated the $5 billion buy-up of U.S. Treasuries (long positions) and simultaneous short-sale of airline, insurance, and tourism stocks in the weeks before 9-11. The SEC investigated, but of course its findings were either inconclusive, embarrassing or classified immediately because they were inconclusive except to the extent they were embarrassing. As with all such interesting and important questions in recent American history, such as who it was that dumped anthrax all over the American landscape in 2001, the inquiries sank beneath the relentless tide of ensuing disasters and were never heard from again.

I don't know if Luthor bin Laden could have foreseen events all the way forward to July 2006. I'm a chess player and appreciate the difficulties of imagining changing positions in a fluid environment, that is, where you must envision the results of your opponent's possible moves, your response, his possible responses, etc. 'Tis said the greatest chess players are able to imagine the board, seeing it steady and seeing it whole, perhaps 3 or 4 moves in the future. If you think that's easy, you haven't played much chess. Clearly Osama Lex saw the Afghan invasion coming, and did what he could to slow the inevitable American victory. I doubt that he was ever in Tora Bora, or spent any time in Pakistan, where Mastermind Khallid Sheikh Mohammed was captured. I think OBL simply floated rumors to that effect so the Democrats could harp endlessly about MediocreMan's failure to "capture or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora." I think Lex has always been in Iran, where he can count on consistent anti-American feeling and a more or less stable regime.

I think OBL saw the Iraqi invasion coming, and could probably foresee that 9-11 would be used as a generalized motivating principle by Bush to invade an Arab country. The handwriting for that one was on the wall, and not just in an Afghan cave. The PNAC crowd of neo-conservatives had been beating the drum for years. Of course, invading Iraq was a completely irrational response to terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., but taking stock of your arch-enemy's irrational tendencies is part of good strategic thinking. I think that bin Lexen also knew that MediocreMan's analysis of the post-invasion aftermath would be "facile," and not in the sense Bush intended in his solecism yesterday at the Maliki press conference, where he argued for a "flexible and facile" approach to curbing violence in Baghdad, demonstrating the dangers inherent in a new-word-a-day program when practiced by a verbally inept leader (Bush's verbal SAT actually was about 150 points too low for admission to Yale, so in this sense he is LessThanMediocreMan).

Bush's homely, touching vision of Iraqis as just like people everywhere is, of course, a noble ideal, but it appears that media accounts that Bush did not know about the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sects until the invasion was underway may have been right on the money. The Cowboy divided the Iraqi population into only two groups, (1) the aspiring democrats, and (2) the killers who hate freedom. This oversimplification has proved an intractable flaw in his analysis. Lex bin L., an ideological and religious foe of Hussein, probably had a good sense of what would happen when the artificial cohesion of Saddam's tyrannical rule was loosened; namely, exactly what we're seeing today, where the Iraqis are waging civil war and killing each other in carload lots, along with smaller numbers of American soldiers and international journalists. Osama knew about sectarian rivalries in the House of Islam, not always a perfect Dar es Salaam.

Could Lexama have seen all the way to the ascendancy of a Shiite government pulled gravitationally toward Shiite Iran, the strengthening of Hezbollah by its ties to Iran, the alawi Shia in Syria, and the new Shia government in Iraq, and the ensuing difficulites with Israel and the cascading difficulties for the United States in attempting to cope with a disintegrating Middle East? All as the result of 9-11 and of a hamfisted, unlettered response to a terrorist attack by a President in way over his mediocre head? Is this why bin Luthor would have timed his 2004 video to aid the Cowboy of Steel in his neck-and-neck struggle with another yutz, John Kerry?

If all that's true, bin Laden is a helluva chess player, and probably clever beyond the imagination of even Jerry Siegel. I think our modern day Lex has been pleasantly surprised by the fortuitous cooperation he has received from MediocreMan. To bring the world close to a Clash of Civilizations 5 years after hijacking 4 American airliners and committing what was, at bottom, simply a stateless, criminal act, exceeded even the arch-villain's fondest, perfervid fantasies. It is as if all bin Laden did was to pull the plunger on a pinball machine. The ensuing lights, bells, crashes, caroms and mounting death toll -- someone else did all that for him.

Bush as Rocket Scientist

Watching a recent panel discussion among New York Times columnists via the Web, I saw the execrable David Brooks huffing and puffing about his intimate access to the "inner circle" of the Bush Administration, much to the annoyance and disdain of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, the other two panelists. I don't usually say much about the personal appearance of other people, reasoning that we all have our crosses to bear, but there was something disgusting about the pudgy little Mr. Brooks sitting there in his tan suit with black shoes, grinning his smug little snaggle-tooth smile, his white sidewall haircut -- all of which must make the Bushies, with their rough frat boy humor, viciously savage him when he's not around.

But he does seem to be around. He carries the BushCo's water at the Old Gray Lady, writing irritatingly "evenhanded" columns that nevertheless wind up as full-throated defenses of every Bush insanity that comes at us with sickening regularity, and they have rewarded him by making him seem like a "serious" journalist with the inside scoop, and he's not going to give that up. He attempts to take the "social sciences" seriously, arguing with a "rigor" usually reserved for physics and mathematics (so he may think), but one thing I've noticed is that his columns are so incoherent, the arguments so diffuse, that you can read one sentence at a time and realize, as you go, that none of the sentences adheres to the one before or just after it. It is simply a series of ponderous, not to say sententious, declarations about....something. Iraq, or the tendency of Mexican illegal immigrants to buy children's furniture in greater abundance than Anglos (an actual example), and none of it ever leads anywhere. One is reminded of the great exchange between Sir Thomas More and Richard in "A Man for All Seasons." "More: It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales, Richard?" For the sake of his little nook at the NY Times, his piece of Wales, Brooks has bartered his soul, and the withering disdain of Maureen Dowd, as she listened to Brooks tell his little story about going to a U-2 concert with someone on the Bush staff (Maureen looked as if she'd just swallowed a bad oyster), told me she shares this Faustian view.

But that's not really the point of this post. Brooks, as such, isn't interesting enough. He's another hack doing Bush's dirty work. The panel at one point turned its focus on Bush's intelligence. They all agreed he's actually smarter than he often appears in public. Thank God for that. What if he were actually stupider? Brooks, in his rigorous, quantifying way, said that Bush in private was about "20 points" smarter than he seems in public.

The natural question thus arises (although not addressed by the panel): What is y, where y = x + 20? I put the matter algebraically to show Brooks I'm a real numbers man myself. I also know you can't solve that equation without positing a value for x. So I'll posit one. In public, Bush comes off as a guy with an IQ of about 100, the center of the bell curve distribution. Some learned analysts who have attempted to estimate the IQs of U.S. Presidents have considered the syntax used, the papers written and published, and other (admittedly subjective) criteria to place the Presidents on some sort of continuum, and have ranged the IQs from the really smart (Nixon, Carter, Clinton) to the fairly smart (Kennedy, Johnson) to the not very smart at all (Bush the Elder, Reagan). Bringing up the rear in this analysis was L'il Georgie, who was pegged at 97, not flattering at all. But perhaps the data were forced? And anyway, George Junior has never published anything, probably including blue book exams at Yale and Harvard.

So I'll give Bush 3 points more and then agree that he's got an IQ in the range of 117 to 120, giving the serious cognitive metrics guys their due. I also think this comports with results he apparently achieved on the SAT and Texas Air Guard tests, and is also consistent with the tougher Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) his score on which has perhaps understandably been kept confidential, since he failed to get into the University of Texas Law School despite his father's ownership of the state. A guy like Clinton, on the other hand, with a nice, normal Southern White Trash upbringing (about which I personally know quite a bit - not his, mine) got into Yale undergraduate and Georgetown Law all on his own merits. I just threw that in.

So Bush isn't dumb. He's somewhat above average. That's what he hates about himself, and why he's so pretentious, arrogant and delusional. He needs to believe, against all evidence, that he's actually brilliant, but in some iconoclastic, ethereal way that maybe only he understands. The thing is, he's not. He is somewhat better than a mediocrity. The question thus settled then leads to another one: is somewhat better than a mediocrity actually good enough to be President of the United States?

We might compare it to other fields, such as brain surgery, rocket science or law. If you needed difficult neurosurgery, say removal of a tiny tumor on the pituitary gland requiring entry through the nose and impinging dangerously on the optic nerves, would you be content with a neurosurgeon who told you his IQ was 117, that he'd graduated near the bottom of his class in med school, and spent the first 40 years of his life drinking? Inhale that anesthesia? How about if you were an astronaut sitting atop a Saturn rocket and the director of mission control was someone who had (in some nepotistic way) achieved a PhD in astrophysics, but whose IQ was 120? Count down to zero? You're on trial for a capital offense (killing a blastocyst with a .45, e.g.), and your lawyer tells you he graduated in the bottom 3rd of the class, he has an IQ of 118, but don't worry, we'll get through this thing? Sign the retainer?

The answers are likely to be (1) no, (2) all systems no go, and (3) you're fucking kidding me, right? A rational response in each instance. And why? Because these pros just aren't smart enough for what's involved, that's why. They're not fixing a faulty flush mechanism on your toilet, they're dealing with your survival. Suppose something goes wrong during the procedure, the orbit, the trial? You want someone who can improvise, think outside the box, come up with something quick that works. You want someone really, really smart, don't you. Otherwise, supposing this man is President, the second plane could hit the second tower, and he just sits there, stupefied, without a clue as to how to react. If you began to bleed profusely during your brain surgery, you don't want the neurosurgeon to grab his copy of "My Pet Goat" while he tries to figure out how to stop your imminent exsanguination. If the heat shield burns off your reentry vehicle, you don't want some clown who screams "bring it on" to your spacecraft as you atomize on hitting the atmosphere. If the prosecution elicits surprise testimony during your penalty phase, you don't want your lawyer to start complaining about what "hard work" being an attorney is.

Bush is a so-so guy trying to hold down a job that is one of the most complex and demanding in the world. The results are predictable. Everyone can see it. Thanks, Mr. Brooks, for providing a starting point, and have fun in Wales.

The logical labyrinth of the stem cell veto

Embryonic development, when it proceeds inside the uterus, is usually divided into 23 specific stages and occurs during the first 8 weeks following fertilization. Stem cell research, as envisioned by the Senate's just-vetoed Enhancement Act, does not use embryos developed within the human uterus; rather, such research employs embryos which have developed outside the uterus in a nutritive medium to about Stage 4, where mitosis (cell division) is arrested by freezing and held in cryonic suspension indefinitely. At the point of freezing, the embryo has developed to a blastocyst comprised of about 100 cells, is smaller than a millimeter, and has no discernible human shape or characterstics.

There are currently about 400,000 blastocysts sitting in freezers in fertility clinics around the United States. Fertility treatment tends toward redundancy wherever possible, since in vitro fertilization is inherently more problematic than the natural human thing. Couples seeking a child through such techniques often create more embryos than they ever intend to implant, and fertility specialists pick and choose among the embryos created to select the best cell clumps (morphologically and otherwise) for implantation. Most of the embryos will never be implanted, and will ultimately be thrown away.

President Bush has, in a relatively straightforward manner, equated the deliberate destruction of IVF embryos with murder and the killing of innocent life. This is his rationale for vetoing the Enhancement Act; to sign the bill, in his view, is to offer federal financing for murder of the innocent. While he concedes research using embryonic stem cell lines offers promise, the moral equation is such that the bill must be vetoed. Bush pointed out in his tele-op conference, surrounded by "snowflake" babies, that his veto does not mean embryonic stem cell research cannot proceed through private funding or through state programs, such as those currently in California and Massachusetts.

This is a curious acquiescence, under the circumstances. If Bush is going to go so far as to equate the destruction of human embryos for research with homicide, then how can he rest his case with a simple veto of the Senate bill, denying federal funding for research? If it's murder, it's murder, and his oath of office includes his promise to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, which Bush quoted at his tele-veto conference. One of the "unalienable" rights is the right to life, which may not be taken without due process of law. While Bush was actually quoting the Declaration of Independence, you get the idea. All 50 states and the federal government have criminal laws against homicide, and Bush is sworn to enforce those laws.

So we find ourselves in a logical labyrinth, where the Swimmer always likes to splash around (excusing the mixed metaphors). Consider the following direct consequences of regarding the destruction of cell clumps as murder:

1. Why should a couple ever be allowed to "abandon" or consent to the destruction (by thawing, for example) of any currently-frozen embryo? Why isn't this, at the very least, conspiracy to commit murder?

2. If an arsonist burns down a building which happens to contain a fertility clinic housing 5,000 frozen blastocysts, hasn't the arsonist committed mass murder on a scale comparable to the 9-11 plotters?

3. If a maintenance company responsible for servicing the embryo freezer at a clinic negligently does its work, resulting in the unintentional thawing and killing of 5,000 embryos, would the employees involved be guilty of 5,000 counts of involuntary manslaughter?

4. Why would anyone in his right mind run a fertility clinic, given the heavy criminal consequences of any kind of screw-up?

Much more branching paradox can be found within Bush's Labyrinth. Focus on the idea that the destruction of a 100-cell blastocyst is the same as shooting down a grown man in cold blood, and the examples will come to you. It will also suggest the arbitrariness of investing an embryo with a soul only after fertilization. Why wait so long? The embryo, after all, resulted from penetration of an ovum by a sperm cell. Certainly the raw material of the soul must have been present in each of these component parts before fertilization and mitosis began. These arguments have all been anticipated in the abortion debate, of course. But in my memory, Bush's statements yesterday were the first time a President actually used the term "killing of innocent life" to describe the destruction of an embryo outside the human body. It's a new frontier, a new premise, an expansion and deepening of the invasion of essentially religious ideas into American life.

Not that any of this ever occurs to Bush. He just says stuff and moves on, leaving the serious thinkers capable of extrapolation to wonder just how nuts it will all get before he's through.

As the Four Horses Round the Clubhouse Turn and Head Down the Backstretch

Behold a Pale Horse, the Death Pony,
by a neck over War, the White Horse, but in the money
we got yer Pestilence and Famine, bringing up the rear,
but Famine should do well after War, Pestilence and Death work their Satanic magic.
Pestilence the Bird Flu, esp. the Second Wave,
and War we have in abundance, all over the globe now,
but especially where the world's billion Muslims pay the most attention,
and George, and Dick, and Rummy, here's what the Track Touts are sayin,
down at the Armageddon OTC,
even an army full of Farsi-spoutin' Mr. T's, I pity the mullah, won't be enough,
esp. after the unholy distribution network of Pakistan's Nuke Wal-Mart
run by A.Q. Khan (The Night Manager) gets into full swing,
and the Millenialists square off against the Virgin Seekers with bristlin' thermonukes,
and those who, unlike Bo Belinsky, that Original Angel,
who found Paradise right here in the chicks spilled like lazy hour glasses along the beach in SoCal,
absolutely must destroy this world in order to bring on the hallucinatory Next One,
will finish us off perhaps before Heat Death can do the trick,
and the pity is, of course, that as dissolute as Bo Belinsky may have seemed,
he represented the preservation of Order in the Universe,
of holding things together through peace, harmony and diversified sex,
whereas the Apocalyptics have the massive teleological advantage of Entropy working for them,
the raving madness that moves all order in the Universe
toward a finished condition of stasis, powerlessness and dispersion,
and they just can't wait to get there.

Terrorism By The Numbers

Assuming that only Islamic Fundamentalists are potential terrorists (and this is a false assumption), a reasonable calculation of the resource pool from which such terrorists might be drawn can be undertaken mathematically as follows.

While disputes exist concerning the total number of Muslims in the world, a round figure often accepted is 1.2 billion. Muslims currently comprise about 22% of the world's population. Since Islam tends to be concentrated, as a majority population, in underdeveloped or poor regions of the world where population growth is higher, the growth rate among Muslims is higher than in Western countries. As a result of this disparity (about 2.2% annual growth versus 2.9% for Muslims), Muslims will comprise approximately 30% of the world's population by the year 2020.

Muslim populations tend to be younger than in the Western countries; for example, in Algeria half the population is under 20, and this is common among all densely populated Muslim areas, such as Iran and Indonesia. Assuming that terror activists tend to be younger rather than older, the cohort "bubble" moving through the population would naturally swell during the next 2 decades or so.

Taking the present numbers (1.2 billion) and assuming that half the population is male (600 million), and assuming that currently one-third of all such males are age-appropriate for terror activism (200 million), and further assuming that only 1% of such males are inclined to act out terroristic tendencies, we have a group of approximately 2 million Muslim young men who might engage in terrorism against the West or within the Muslim world. Further, since the population pressures in the Muslim world are increasing and tilting toward the younger end of the population distribution curve, one would expect the numbers to increase, even holding steady the very conservative 1% guess, especially since this figure is apt to rise as poverty in the Muslim world increases with larger populations and the relative disparity in wealth in West/Asia versus the Muslim world also widens.

Therefore, the "war on terrorism," while useful as a shibboleth or for domestic political purposes in the West, is completely hopeless. Such a conclusion is given enhanced inevitability by noting that nuclear bombs are now proliferating among "rogue" nations, including Pakistan and North Korea, and that nuclear know-how is diffuse among Muslim scientists in former republics of the disbanded U.S.S.R. If the West uses a single instance of a nuclear explosion in the West as the result of terrorist activity as a kind of Rubicon noting the end of civilized life anywhere (which it very well might be), then it seems appropriate to say that such Civilized Life has an expiration date printed on the gable spout of this particular quart of milk in world history, and that date is not very far off.

Therefore, in Game Theory, a different approach is clearly called for. Under an analysis where "realistic" approaches, such as the War on Terror and Getting Tough in general are seen to lead to the inevitable end of Civilized Life, as the above analysis suggests, then ANY approach which offers a promise of sustaining civilized life is by definition more "realistic" and productive. Such an approach has already been described.

Sing the words to John Lennon's "Imagine," take them to heart, and live by them.

ACOA (Adult Citizens of Alcoholics) Meeting: Minutes of July 11 mtg.

Facilitator: Who has something up right now?
Jones: I'm concerned that the President said global warmings are debatable on whether it's caused by humans or naturally occurring, and that we need to decrease our reliance on foreign sources of oil.
Facilitatior: What bothers you about that statement?
Jones: It doesn't make any sense.
Facilitator: Anyone else? Bob?
Bob: The President keeps saying Iraq is going well and it actually looks like holy hell over there, with people being dragged out of their houses and cars and shot, and American skinheads with personality disorders raping and murdering civilians...
Facilitator: Take a moment and breathe.
Bob: It just seems so fucked up.
Facilitator: Okay, good. That's your truth then. Yeah, Nancy?
Nancy: North Korea is firing off missiles like the 4th of July or something, and that nut case has actual bombs, but Bush seems obsessed with Iran, which maybe could have a bomb in 10 years or so. I just don't get it.
Facilitator: Good, Nancy. Be with that feeling.
Jones: So what's going on? How come everything he says is so way off the mark?
Facilitator: What makes you say it's off the mark?
Jones: Whaddya think? It's not happening that way!
Facilitator: And this distresses you?
Jones: Well, yeeaaaahhhhh.
Facilitator: Anyone else feeling the same way? What comes up for the rest of you?
Nancy: It's like he's living in another world or something.
Facilitator: You think you're seeing things very differently, you're saying.
Nancy: Right.
Bob: Check.
Facilitator: It's why you're all here. You are all Adult Citizens of an Alcoholic, and reality distortion is probably the common denominator behind all of your troubling reactions. Mr. Bush is an untreated alkie who habitually lies and distorts reality, and who is actually so far gone that he doesn't even know the difference anymore.
Nancy: Is that why I don't see what he says I ought to be seeing?
Facilitator: Precisely. He always has excuses, for example, obviously with global warming there is no serious scientific debate; however, to admit now that this has been a serious problem for the 5 and a half years he has been in office, while he has done nothing about it, would cause a deep shaming reaction which his weak ego cannot allow. He has led the world to the precipice of disaster and so he has to pretend that he failed to act because of the uncertainty, although none exists.
Bob: Sometimes he says he's actually doing something about it.
Facilitator: Yet it can't be both, which is symptomatic of his denial. In moments of relative clarity, even Bush would recognize the difference between an aggressive, proactive program to deal with the problem versus a few calls to limit "foreign imports" or develop a hydrogen car 10 years from now with about the same money he spends every week in Iraq.
Jones: Then Iraq is a fiasco?
Facilitator: Of course it is. What the Alcoholic-in-Chief is asking you to buy into is his sense of pervasive denial, necessary to support his debilitated ego structure, and to deny the authority of your own senses, to not see what is so plainly right in front of you. This, of course, causes tremendous problems in everyday living.
Bob: What can we do?
Facilitator: For now, simply don't believe a word he says, ever. He can't be trusted on anything.
Nancy: And then?
Facilitator: I would suggest we have another meeting in 2 and half years. Things might improve by then.

If Iraq had been a democracy before 9-11

SCENE: An apartment in Hamburg, Germany, near the al-Qods mosque. It is winter, 1999, and 9-11 pilots Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Sheihi, Ziad Jurrah and Hani Hanjour are discussing the plot.

ATTA: The Emir wishes us to press forward with the mission! Death to the infidel!
AL-SHEIHI: Just a style note, Atta. Do you always have to speak in exclamation points?
ATTA: The Emir's will has been expressed! We shall cut off the head of the Serpent Satan!
AL-SHEIHI: Answers that, I guess.
HANJOUR: What, again, is the Emir's beef?
ATTA: Be not frivolous! The army of the infidel even now defiles the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, at the invitation of the corrupt rulers of Sacred Arabia! He shall be driven out!
JURRAH: And that's because we're going to...
AL-SHEIHI: Don't get him started...
ATTA: The Emir is clear!
JURRAH: Verse, yet...
ATTA: This is the year to finish our pilot training! In America!
JURRAH: Any idea what that FAA cert is worth on the open market? I know a guy...
HANJOUR: You're very unclear on the concept of this thing, Ziad.
ATTA: The Emir awaits us with The Brain in Islamabad!
Al-SHEIHI: We have to go there again?
ATTA: Final instructions before we move to realization of jihad!
HANJOUR: One thing, Mohammed...
ATTA: Yes?
HANJOUR: (clearing spit from eye) Are you aware Iraq is a democracy, kind of?
ATTA: I am aware that a pro-Iranian Shiite government has replaced Saddam, yes! I've got CNN too!
HANJOUR: Well, how's this thing supposed to work now?
Al-SHEIHI: I'm not seeing the difference, Hani. I'm from the UAE.
JURRAH: Lebanon, here.
ATTA: Egypt!
HANJOUR: Yeah, but it's a democracy, kind of, in the heart of the Arab world.
AL-SHEIHI: Heart? Where'd you learn anatomy, Baywatch?
JURRAH: Ankle, maybe.
HANJOUR: But with the swamp drained, how do we even exist?
AL-SHEIHI: You mean, how did four or five guys from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen come to Hamburg, become radicalized by exposure to the West, then get recruited by the Kuwaiti Khallid Sheikh Mohammed and the Saudi Osama bin Laden, then arrange to get about 15 additional guys from Saudi Arabia as muscle on a hijack plot, all of which had nothing to do with Iraq? Is that your question?
HANJOUR: Yes!
AL-SHEIHI: Now you're doing it. I don't know, Hani, why don't we leave that question to the Americans.

Plato's Odyssey: A Story from the Political Nightmare Future: Chap. 2

Plato’s Odyssey: Chapter 2

Plato had simply faced unflinchingly that it was a New America which confronted the Twenty-first Century, and he was a Twenty-first Century Man. Maybe one of the very first. The extrication strategy involving Sheila, which presumably Control knew all about, might impress his handlers, who were themselves implacably New Americans.

Plato had been chosen by a top secret search engine designated “ApoCalypso®,”jointly developed by DataGen® and the Counterterrorism Unit of the Department of State® (“CUDS®”). ApoCalypso® was a drill-down type of database which sought a category of Americans termed the “ÜberDeracinated®,” the most untraceable and undistinguished citizens available in the population, for top secret activities related to the ongoing War on Terror®. Plato was first notified by CUDS® in early 2013. He was given a round trip ticket to Los Angeles International Airport, then driven in an airport shuttle to an elementary school in Fullerton, California, where a meeting was held on a Saturday morning in March. None of the participants was aware of the purpose of the meeting; the calls summoning them were disguised as promotional events in which they would be given free passes to GlobalLand® in exchange for their agreement to listen to a sales pitch for a new development of condominiums in Marina Del Ray.

It is probably a measure of ApoCalypso’s® acuity that the come-on met with a 100% success rate. ApoCalypso® had identified ten American male finalists, and these ten males arrived at John Adams Elementary within fifteen minutes of each other. They were greeted there in Miss Simmons’s homeroom by three men in their late thirties or early forties, dressed casually in sweaters and jeans, sporting conservative haircuts and pleasant smiles, and graciously thanking each of them for agreeing to come. The leader, transparently enigmatized as “Bill Jones,” began by apologizing for the ruse, while assuring each of them that in fact the attendees would be given free passes to GlobalLand® and Knott’s Berry Farm, but that no new condominium developments had been built in Marina Del Ray for more than two decades.

Jones then got down to business. The recruited attendees, or AmeriCruits®, were chosen because they were “positioned” to give the United States a unique form of assistance in the WarOnTerror®. Because of their demonstrated intelligence, good citizenship, impeccable records (no criminal raps, no credit derogatories more than thirty days, many other parameters), lack of personal entanglements (none of the men had wives, children or surviving parents) and other desirable qualities, they could serve as “cut-outs” for a top secret mission which would be described to the survivors among them. The AmeriCruits® assumed, understandably if incorrectly, that Jones was referring to a winnowing process or competition among them for the five jobs available.

The truth was somewhat otherwise. ApoCalypso® was compiled through a crash joint effort by the private and “public” sectors, beginning in late 2001, while the heat of Ground Zero was still gradually dissipating in New York’s early winter. It was, as operatives within the Department of Defense were fond of saying, the Mother of All Databases, the database of databases, designed to run on a network of superfast Crawfish Computers®, which crunched billions of data bytes about every American who had ever surfaced sufficiently to attract any form of attention by the human race. Thus, prior to “augmentation” through an analysis of subjective data, ApoCalypso® churned at relativistic speeds through personal data such as birth certificates, report cards, high school diplomas, religious affiliation, military records, high school and college transcripts, voting registration, vehicle license and registration records, driving records, any purchases ever made on the Internet, any registration ever made on any Website, credit reports from all reporting agencies, records of all bank accounts, all tax returns ever filed, Social Security accounts, professional licensing and discipline records, any appearance on any customer list ever sold in commerce (this tended to multiply exponentially all other data points culled from all other sources, since many of the customer tendency databases resembled a lower-level ApoCalypso® search), all records of marriage and divorce, court records, any land records in any County Recorder’s office, all hotel registrations domestic and abroad, any petitions ever signed regarding any issue, passport records, all books ever purchased or checked out of any public library, visa records, credit card statements, brokerage account statements, utility bills, telephone bills, wiretap records, clandestine surveillance tapes (visual and audio), any request ever made under the now-abolished Freedom of Information Act regarding anything, all letters to Congress or to the editor of any newspaper, all travel arrangements and itineraries ever undertaken, and a catchall category called “idiosyncratic behavior.” This massive data “snapshot” of all subject Americans was subjected to a secondary analysis by a subsidiary application called “ApoCoSorter®” which used weighted values for various data points in an effort to optimize the “InnocoScale®” (short for “innocuousness scale”) and to be certain that the population of this subcategory was comprised solely of the most unremarkable, faceless, anonymous and undistinguished American males between the ages of forty and fifty-five then extant in America.

There were two hundred and fifty semi-finalists in this preliminary cohort. 98% of them were Republicans (affiliates of the Incumbent), 75% of them were members of a social or business club (such as the Optimists or American Pioneers), 83% of them played golf, 97% were football fans, 97% were somewhat overweight, 86% percent of them read Tom Clancy novels, 73% were graduates of a four year university, 3% had been to graduate school, 83% had served in the military, 4% had been to Vietnam, and 0% of them appeared in any Google® match.

The initial cohort was then studied manually by CUDS® operatives, who undertook an exhaustive subanalysis to discover what were termed indistinguishing secondary characterists or ISC® index. The ISC® was then given a logarithmically derived scalar value of 1 to 10, with 1 representing one or two mentions in a local daily newspaper before the age of thirty (such as a wedding announcement or agate-type boxscore for interscholastic sports) and 10 signifying what was termed a “borderline fictitious existence.” Each of the finalists in Ms. Simmons’s homeroom had ISC index ratings between 9.5 and 10.0. Plato’s ranking was 9.7, exceeded only by a balding forty-eight year old from Nebraska, about fifteen pounds overweight, brown hair, brown eyes, brown polyester pants, plaid orange and blue shirt, blue windbreaker, black work shoes and white socks. Names were not used during the orientation session, but the ISC rankings were explained and given for each of the finalists.

Plato had mixed feelings about his inclusion, of course. He knew he was quiet, was aware he didn’t believe in “rocking the boat,” and was peripatetic in his romantic life precisely because he did not like the complications which seemed inevitable with “commitment,” such as shared finances, co-ownership, mutual friends and intimate secrets. All of this simply appeared wise to Plato in the second decade of 21^st Century America. It did not mean he did not have a mind of his own.

For example, after ApoCalypso® was preliminarily explained by Jones, Plato, thinking to himself, was aware of certain logical fallacies and elisions in its design. Plato was actually well-read and as informed as an average American could be in 2014. He made use of the extensive law and general library available at City Hall, but was careful not to check books out, as a rule, although occasionally he would break this pattern so as not to arouse too much suspicion through holding an underused library card. When a new number was published by Karl Manrove or Deborah Jousting or one of their numerous imitators who had achieved fame since the Ascendancy of the Incumbent, Plato checked the book out or at least placed his name on the computerized waiting list. He knew that this practice must have improved critical subcategory values within his overall ISC®, although he did not know by how much.

Plato’s Internet use was similarly misleading, since he always signed on using Mae Wan’s handle and password, which he’d gotten from her during their brief period of physical and “emotional” intimacy, covering his acquisition with his occasional need to sign-on while hanging out at her Inner Richmond District flat on rainy Saturday mornings. He then used the remote function of her ISP to sign on at City Hall’s computer research room, and from there he could acquire the foreign press, opinion journals from European Union capitals and dissident websites hoisted by Americans exported during the period since the Incumbency began. Plato imagined, with a twinkle, what sort of ISC® Mae Han must have been tagged with by ApoCalypso®. The mind reeled. All those hours logged on to anti-American sites, the late night perusal of articles written by exiled American investigative journalists; not a pretty picture and not a salutary index. Mae Han might find herself eating Hunan in its place of origin.

So despite his impressive ISC®, Plato was something of a pretender, someone who, despite outlandishly adverse odds, had apparently outsmarted the system. He found it difficult to credit that viewpoint, however. Increasingly, the Administration of the Incumbent left absolutely nothing to chance. Which was probably the reason for this written examination which Plato found himself enduring in the early afternoon in Ms. Simmons’s homeroom, his knees jammed under the little hinged top of the laminated desk, sitting on a hard blond laminated chair, the helical flourescent lights above humming and crackling. The test did not seem designed to test the power of the intellect. It seemed cast more toward a personality multiphasic, but with a weird orientation toward “American values,” including questions such as:

“1. Does the United States have any history of supporting dictators abroad?

“2. Does freedom of speech extend to battlefields during wartime?

“3. Does the United States owe any obligation to explain its foreign policy to any international body?”

Plato suspected that some sort of Game Theory was at work here. There were only two columns of dashed spaces to blacken with his No. 2 pencil: “Yes” and “No.” To answer “No” to all three questions, which seemed like the safe approach under the Regime® looked suspiciously like pandering. To answer “Yes” to one or more might prove disastrous. Plato resolved the conundrum by answering “No” to Questions 1 and 2 and “Yes” to Question 3, reasoning that the qualifier “any” to the harsh word “obligation” to engage in an action as noncommital as“explaining” was fairly benign and did not signify any sort of impermissible intrusion on American autonomy, which had been raised over the last fourteen years to the status of a religious tenet.

Yet at base, Plato was profoundly uneasy about this entire exercise, the selection by ApoCalypso®, the trip to Los Angeles, the vague references to “serving” the country in a unique capacity. With the broad shroud of secrecy cast over every governmental action during the past decade, it was certainly possible (and no credible means existed to refute this possibility) that the Government used the ruse of honor as a cover to lure dissidents (or “traitors,” as they were termed by the Administration) into just such a self-revealing exercise as this Multiphasic he was now second-guessing his way through. Still, there was no way out of the exercise, and he completed the questionnaire, listened to a few more of Jones’s remarks regarding future contacts, received his free passes to GlobalLand®, and left quietly with the other AmeriCruits®.

Fun with President Bush

On "learning" about the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush reportedly reacted as follows: "To the extent there is latitude to work with the Congress to determine whether or not the military tribunals will be an avenue in which to give people their day in court, we will do so. The American people need to know that the ruling, as I understand it, won't cause killers to be put out on the street."

Presumably, this final remark reflects Bush's relaxation at the news the Hamdan case will not result in his immediate impeachment and removal from office.

But what of the rest of this sparkling verbiage? This is an opportunity to delve into the cognitive workings of the Leader of the Free World and see what's up. Assuming that his verbalization is symptomatic of underlying thought processes, let us deconstruct this quote phrase by phrase:

1. "To the extent there is latitude to work with the Congress to determine whether..." Right away you get an inkling how screwed up this guy's thinking is. (It never takes long, in fact.) First of all, "to the extent" and "latitude," as used here, really amount to the same thing. "Extent" and "latitude" cover identical ground. The phrase could have been stated, "to the extent we can work with Congress to determine..." The latitude is implied in the phrase. But what does the phrase mean? Here we follow along thusly:

2. "or not the military tribunals will be an avenue..." The first thing that comes to mind here is, why wouldn't there be "latitude" to work with Congress sufficient to figure something out? Of course, the "latitude" exists to talk to a bunch of other Republicans about Bush's burning desire to find something that comports less with procedural due process than Uniform Code of Military Justice procedures. Bush doesn't need to be anxious that someone in the Republican Party, including Arlen Specter, is going to go so far as to suggest Guantanamo scum deserve an actual "trial." Let's not get ridiculous. These are people (we guess - no one in authority has ever said, and very few of the Gitmo inmates have ever actually been charged with anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time) who supported Osama bin Laden's 9-11 attack. As did Zacarias Moussaoui, who was recently tried and convicted in a federal district court in Manhattan. But these people are different. They were captured "on the battlefield" and are therefore more like "enemy combatants," much like Jose Padilla who was captured on the battlefield of Chicago's O'Hare Airport and classified an enemy combatant, although he's an American citizen. Fortunately, we're a nation of laws, and not an autocracy run at the capricious whim of one man, like some countries we could name. Where were we? Oh yeah. So the latitude is there to figure something out, George. You don't need to "determine" that part. What is it you're trying to figure out?

3. "whether or not the military tribunals will be an avenue in which to give people their day in court,..." Well, George, there you go again. The "military tribunals," as you cooked them up, are the very thing the Supreme Court said you couldn't use, because you usurped Congressional legislative authority, under Article 1 of the Constitution, to determine UCMJ rules and the applicability of the Geneva Conventions. So I can save you time here. In using your latitude to discuss things with Congress to determine anything, don't bother talking about the military tribunals you pulled out of John Ashcroft's ass, because those are off the table. Although keep heart: Congress will come up with some Draconian amendment to the UCMJ to get you closer to your true hope of staging your very own Show Trials, just like some of your heroes used to do. Leading to the summary:

4: "an avenue in which to give people their day in court." Avenue is such a sunny, cheery word. Alas, the whole point of your star chamber procedures in the first place was to make two things certain. That the Gitmo detainees never have a day in court, and that they never have an open forum to discuss all the Geneva Convention violations inflicted upon them. The idea of a "day" in court, however, sounds just about right. Thirty minutes, to be exact.

So what is George W. Bush actually pledging to do, when you read his statement as a whole? He is saying he will figure out whether there is any point in talking to Congress to see if they'll go along with his kangaroo court. Read it through carefully and you will see the man revealed.

Simpler Times in Israel

Three Wise Men In Attendance, Bethlehem

FIRST WISE MAN: (to Joseph)

It's funny, he doesn't look much like you. Doesn't even look Jewish.

JOSEPH:

I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not the father.

FIRST WISE MAN: (shocked)

No-o-o! What are you saying to me?

JOSEPH:

Not that this should shock you, but he's God's kid. She told me.

FIRST WISE MAN:

Uh, Joe. Look, she hadda come up with something, okay? It happens.

JOSEPH:

I think it's true.

SECOND WISE MAN:

Your wife's shtupping God? What kind of town is this?!

JOSEPH:

Not actually God, I don't think. But how do I know? Apparently I was the last to know about a lot of things. God, you know, He could have asked. I mean, He wrote the Ten Commandments, not me. Seems like two of them covered this. But she's saying the deed itself was done by an angel.

THIRD WISE MAN:

I mean no disrespect, Joe, but it's tough to compete with that. You take great care of yourself, don't get me wrong. But an angel…So the kid favors the father, you think?

JOSEPH:

Time will tell. From what I hear, the angel was blond, and sort of….radiant.

SECOND WISE MAN:

You don't think....?

JOSEPH:

No.

FIRST WISE MAN:

Well, anyway, we'll leave this stuff here.

JOSEPH:

Tell you what, fellas. The gold is great, and thanks. But the frankincense and myrrh, please, it's bad enough we're in a stable.

(Exeunt all)

What, Them Worry?

One idea that floats around in my mind and occasionally alights long enough for me to think through its implications is this: suppose Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq is not incompetent, as it is so frequently described by liberals, but is going exactly according to plan?

The liberal critique is based upon a false equivalence between Bush's values and liberal values, in my opinion. The critique misses the mark precisely because it presupposes that Bush's overarching presidential agenda has something to do with the commonweal, i.e., is directed toward improving the lot of the "ordinary American."

Another approach taken by the Left and by Administration critics generally is to call Bush a tool of Big Business and a corrupt neo-Fascist, who serves only the interests of the Big Money whose agenda he faithfully executes. I would surmise that Bush's more-or-less constant support at about the 35% level is comprised of 2 principal groups, (1) a cynical tycoon class lacking public ethics and (2) religious and militaristic morons. 65% of the American people fall into neither class and thus see Bush for what he is. But what is that?

I descry a tension between these two viewpoints. In a sense, it can't really be both. How could Bush be incompetent at protecting and advancing the interests of the American commoner and competent at retaining the support of Big Business for his actual agenda? Competence or incompetence is more of a piece than that. Bush can accomplish what interests him. It is simply that the welfare of the American people, as a whole, does not interest him at all. This, I would argue, is the true meaning of debacles such as Katrina, and why Bush strenuously argued for giving the United Arab Emirates, home of Flight 175 Pilot, Marwan al-Sheihi, control over America's main sea ports. He just doesn't give a shit.

I never see this paradox discussed. I think it's because the Left is so busy describing Bush as an idiot they overlook the inherent contradiction. Bush is not an idiot; he is an intellectual mediocrity, to be sure, but numerous corrupt leaders with autocratic tendencies have been intellectual mediocrities. The limited intelligence is not a serious obstacle to achieving corrupt goals when the leader is backed by the full force of a police and military apparatus, as Hitler was, as Stalin was, as Castro is. In Bush's case, he has the full backing of a solid Republican majority, duly elected, whom he has never vetoed, and who will enact any legislation he really cares about (tax cuts and war funding) and will only resist on symbolic issues Bush does not really care about (immigration and gay marriage) for reasons of local electoral politics.

So Bush has gotten nearly everything he wanted and accomplished the main goals of the money class. Iraq fits into this picture very nicely. Halliburton, for one egregious example, was trading at $20 per share in 2001 and is at $70 per share now. Cheney holds 433,000 stock options on Halliburton, all of which are now in the money to a greater or lesser extent. The VP signed an agreement to donate any profit on the exercise of these options to charity as a means of avoiding serious conflict-of-interest problems. Worrying about Halliburton and Cheney specifically, however, is another hobby horse of the Left, who let such easy targets obscure the view of the larger picture. A broader picture would encompass a perspective that a slow, grinding, protracted stalemate in Iraq is perfect for Big Business. No other approach can yield such high financial returns from the prosecution of the war.

Consider the alternatives. A quick and efficient victory, turning over a stable government to the Iraqis, would end the gravy train, frustrate bomb and munitions makers, deny defense contractors huge paydays for Humvees, personnel carriers, helicopters, etc., and probably result in a decrease in the defense budget generally. Similarly, a rout of American forces (which won't happen) would also terminate the feeding frenzy. What works perfectly, like Baby Bear's porridge and bed, is a protracted stalemate in the desert. We neither win nor lose, and any call by the Democrats for withdrawal is called "cowardly" cut and run politics which will "embolden" America's enemies.

That's actually pretty good, when you think about it. Bush deliberately screws around in Iraq so that the conflict consumes his entire presidency and then (successfully) complains that any criticism is "defeatist." The National Priorities Project places the current cost of the war at $292 billion, and of course a compliant Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, will authorize any further funding requests from Bush so that they can claim to "support the troops."

Ah yes, the troops. That is one possible downside of playing rope-a-dope in Iraq. Over 2,500 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and probably 6 times that number have been seriously wounded to such an extent their lives will never be the same. From each fatality or wound, effects like ripples on a pond spread in all directions to affect sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives. They are, however, "volunteers," and cannot be pitied (so the reasoning goes) for being asked to do what they contracted to do. In this case, as George Carlin neatly summarized, their job is to carry out the war plan. That plan is to ride around in a truck until you get blown up.

I think until the American public as a whole simply accepts how deeply cynical, venal and plutocratic the Bush administration really is, it will never accurately analyze why BushCo does things the way it does. The arrogance of the Left is that it imagines that its very simple analysis, that America doesn't "have enough troops," or that we failed to secure the ammo dumps, or that we disbanded the Iraqi Army too soon, etc., were all tactical blunders that only the Left can see, and "Bush" (actually, Rumsfeld and his High Command) were unable to perceive. This seems fanciful to me. Of course they could see the same things, and the option has always been available until recently (when troop deployments have been overextended) to dramatically increase the manpower in Iraq.

But why do that? Why not keep cutting checks to Halliburton, to Bechtel, to KBR, to Sikorsky and Bell, to Martin Marietta, to United Technologies? Think about it. The federal government's hands are tied by entitlements to a useless payout of pensions and health benefits under Social Security and Medicare. A large part of the budget is spoken for before Congress and Bush even start talking about what can be spent on favored, inner-circle defense businesses. But that residual, that remainder, commands a lot of respect and loyalty among defense tycoons, and the American arms merchants, whatever the fate of the rest of America's moribund manufacturing industries, continue to lead the world. They make big money peddling death, and they depend on the federal government to promote war, to stir up hostility in the world, even to turn the world against us, so their services never become unnecessary. And when they make all that money, they keep it, thanks to Bush's other great obsession, "tax relief."

He's not incompetent. He accomplished what he came to do, to shift the burden of government onto the backs of America's disappearing middle class, and to suck off the federal largesse for the benefit of the fat cat cronies. Mission, that is, Accomplished.

You May As Well Stay Here, Right Now

MEMORY

You can’t actually remember anything, he said.

Apropos of nothing, not even of the still air or the drooping leaves above the slatted table, rickety in the uneven gravel underfoot.

Try it. What do you think is vivid for you?

The tennis games, with a friend. Years ago. My knees creak now, there isn’t much flexibility in my back, I don’t flow as I once did. So I don’t play. But then we did. I looked forward to it even when I didn’t.

Try to remember a point.

Okay. I serve…

What did you do? Describe all of it.

I toss the ball with my left hand…

Can you see your hand?

Well, now I can…

But not a moment ago. You were going to rush by that, the way you would see your upturned palm. You saw it then, when you hit the serve, but now, as you describe it, you weren’t going to say anything.

Well, how much time do you want me to take to describe one serve?

Then don’t describe it. See it in your mind and make it happen at the same speed as the serve really happened.

He took a drink from his tall glass of mineral water and put it back on the slatted table. The paint-scaling top of the white table. The table wobbled a little, and parabolic waves washed to the lip of the glass.

I’m doing that.

Who else is in the picture?

Well, I see my friend across the net…

There must have been other people at the court. Who are they, what do they look like, what are they doing?

I don’t know.

Does the serve go in?

I don’t know.

Is it returned? What does it sound like? Where are the clouds in the sky that day? Where precisely on the blue concavity are they located, and do they move as you do after you serve? What do the people do that must have been there?

I can’t see any of that.

You must have seen it at the time.

Probably. Maybe peripherally.

Much that is central is also missing.

True.

Making love. There must have been transcendent moments.

Yes. Of course.

Try to remember one such moment, and follow it with your mind keeping all perceptions in view as you follow it, her eyes, did they grow bigger?, the color of the walls in the room, the pattern of folds in the sheet, the feel of entry, the warmth of skin, the play of light through the window. How much can you see?

I can only see one little thing at a time.

And the one thing you can see, you can’t tell from which time, can you? You’re remembering a composite experience, an idealization of many events as if they happened all at once. Did you commute to work?

I felt a great weariness as I said yes.

Try to remember how you went to work.

I took the ferry across the Bay for awhile.

How exotic. For how long?

Three years. Maybe four years, maybe five even.

He took his right index finger and brushed down the right side of his gray mustache. He smiled. Try to remember a single passage. How many times would you have crossed? Two hundred times a year, twice a day? That’s perhaps two thousand trips. That’s 1500 hours, shall we say? That seems right. That’s sixty-two and a half days of travel, two full months of nothing but riding on that ferry all day and all night. Can you remember a trip?

Parts of one or two. At the beginning. I usually worked a crossword.

Try to think of a word. Try to remember one intersection of words in one puzzle.

Nothing comes to me.

How did you get to high school?

By bus. Then by car, later.

Can you remember a single trip to school? From start to finish?

No. One day we were on a semi-circular street, in an old coupe, and we stopped to pick up this guy who had a deformed hand. I remember being first aware of that hand on the way to school, one morning. Though I’m not sure we were going to school, or why we picked him up.

I can’t remember anything completely.

No you can’t. Yet do you think you live to acquire memories?

Sometimes that seems the point of accumulating experience.

Yes. But an illusion. You haven’t acquired anything you can ever retrieve.

No, I suppose not. But still something.

Yes.

Something was there. A feeling.

Yes. That is what you are left with. A feeling. A million feelings, emotional senses, reactions, the flow of blood to the skin, the rush of anticipation. In those sketchy fragments the feelings are caught up, like dew on a spider’s web. That is what remains after the moving wave of time pushes by the moment. It is why you have been so skimpy in your description of where we are. A few remarks about scaly tables, a few leaves, a glass of water. It will all be lost anyway.

It’s inevitable.

I won’t trouble you further.

© 2003

On Reading Emily Dickinson and Seeing An Inconvenient Truth, All in the same weekend

Oh Lord I doth fear
We have made the Earth too hot this year.
Everywhere, the signs are plain to see,
First, glaciers melt like Niagara Falls,
Then Vegas-by-the-Sea.
I think we should have dialed it back
Before the Pole un-froze
We can’t expect a polar bear
To swim like Murray Rose.

Alas, there was a time I hoped,
When humans, loathsome turds,
Would bear their folly all alone,
And not the beasts and birds.
But no; we’ll take them as we go,
And not by dribs and drabs,
When greenhouse morphs to runaway
And oceans boil their crabs.

Sir Hawking says we ought to flee,
To Mars or deepest space,
And save a vestige of our genes
To wreck some other place.
With all respect for such a mind,
I can’t but thus remark,
Let’s send the creatures in our place
A Noah-less Noah’s Ark.

Plato's Odyssey: A Story from the Poltiical Nightmare Future

PLATO’S ODYSSEY

Plato Tsukalis made his preparations carefully during the final two weeks he remained in San Francisco. Closing up the details of a long residency was clearly not something that could be accomplished responsibly without lead times, notice periods, the other obeisances to a civilized life.

It was necessary, of course, to call Sheila and tell her it was over. At fifty-two and never married, Plato was inured to this process, knew intimately its stages, progression and end point. Indeed, he made the breakup an early item on his March 15 to-do list, the first time he could remember making a bullet point of something so emotionally intimate; but the distractions which would ensue after he told her needed time to resolve so the more pressing items could be attended to with a focussed attention. This proved to be a wise course of action. He was, frankly, unprepared for the furor of her response. In the previous twelve breakups over the preceding decade, he had encountered all manner of reaction, from outrage to weepy collapse. But the vitriol, importuning, blackmail, threats and aggression which Sheila brought to the process was altogether something new.

Plato, always logical, considered the distinctions between this breakup and the prior episodes, and chalked up the difference to chronology. It was always the first place to look, when you think about it. The chief difference between our reactions to predictable events at any point in our lives relates to the passage of time, which is only to say that inevitably anything that happens now occurs at a later point in life than something which happened then. Thus, we bring to our analysis the life lessons acquired in the interim between events, and also our increasing suspicion that things of this kind don’t matter much because eventually we’ll reach the point where nothing can happen anymore. This, at least, was Plato’s sense of the inevitable.

He essayed this explanation to Sheila in the small kitchen of her two bedroom Russian Hill apartment. He was leaning against her Corian® counter top, his left palm resting on the attractively beveled edge, while he sipped a Bourbon and soda. The drink was a good idea but the condescension was disastrous.

“You think you can fucking leave me now, after more than a year! You fucking bastard! I’m forty-seven years old! You think you can just throw me off and walk out of here so you can continue your ‘life adventure,’ you fucking creep! Why didn’t I see this about you? You can’t stick to anything, you fucking jerk! You asshole, you motherfucking asshole!”

She took her own drink and threw it violently against the cabinet door just behind Plato. The cabinet door, unfortunately, was also made of glass, and shards fell loudly onto the virtually indestructible Corian® surface, leaving it unmarked but Plato shaken, as he jumped away from the counter to avoid laceration. He set his drink down and headed for the front door. Sheila slumped, head in hands and sobbing, against the Corian® on her side of the galley kitchen, the key components of which were arranged in the classic triangle pattern, the range to the right of the shattered glass cabinets, the refrigerator on Sheila’s side, and the sink to the left of the spot just vacated by Plato. He thought with a moment’s regret that he would miss this ordered habitat as he gripped the door handle for perhaps the last time.

He was very wrong about its being the last time, however, as he needed the entire two weeks of the latter part of March for negotiations, damage control, feigned capitulation and other extrication devices in order to make the separation stick. This complicated, of course, the other more quotidian processes of terminating the lease on his own Telegraph Hill apartment, quitting his job at City Hall, placing his furniture in storage, and informing those few people who needed to know that he would be gone for “an extended period.” He wanted to delay disconnecting his telephone, of course, until the very last since it was essential to accomplishing many of the items on his to-do list, but leaving the line intact entailed a serious jeopardy. The same day he walked out of Sheila’s apartment for what was not the ultimate, nor the penultimate, nor even very far down the list of last times, she began calling, frequently, at any hour, in many moods, on different tacks and at wildly varying volumes. It made Plato rethink the wisdom of relying so heavily on the Internet for introductions.

She could be cajoling: “Plato,” she might murmur into the phone at three am, as if operating on heavy doses of unprescribed prescription drugs, acquired from a spam-dealer with access to high quality shit, “I know you’re confused right now. It’s a confusing time of life for both of us, we’re afraid because we’ve been hurt before and we don’t know who to trust. We can’t walk away from every challenge, Plato.”

She could be threatening: “Plato,” she would start, more often in the business-like hours of late morning, “I don’t know if you know what ‘living hell’ actually means, but I can make your life one. You know that? You give me this bullshit about a fucking ‘extended period of absence,’ like I don’t know we both know you’re talking about a woman, a much younger woman of course, you fucking creep, and like I’m not going to find out who she is, you fucking moron, like you could actually get away with this. Give me a fucking break, Plato. Who the fuck you think you’re dealing with?”

Plato was increasingly unsure about the answer to that last one. From the language, maybe a former long-haul truck driver or steel plant foreman. She called him at work many times during those two weeks. The City Hall operator would put the call through to his department in Legal Filing, where Plato had worked for seven years. He was a valued employee in the Civil Division as the only clerk whose first language was English. Any question from a fast-talking lawyer was handed off to him by the stoic Mandarin- or Spanish-speaking junior clerks, who had particular trouble following the rapid fire cadence of transplanted Manhattanites who impatiently demanded answers about filing fees, numbers of copies, format, et cetera.

“Lemme gi’ you Misser Tsukalis,” Plato would hear Mae Wan Huang say. With averted eyes, Mae Wan would murmur that Plato had a call on line one. Plato and Mae had dated desultorily for awhile about six years ago, before Plato gave up on co-employees and focussed on dating services, the immediate precursor to the Internet.

“Who?!” Plato would hear through Mae’s phone just before Mae hung up.

“Choo-kalis,” Plato would say calmly, picking up the phone, informing the caller that clerks could not give legal advice, then answering the question in elaborate legal detail. He adopted a collegial tone when answering questions from lawyers about format, copies, even legal strategy. Plato had two years of night law school behind him and he understood the basic concepts of contract and tort law, had read thousands of legal briefs, complaints, petitions and the rest of the Dickensian costly nonsense of the lawyer’s trade, all during the many slow hours in a filing clerk’s life. The rushes were in the early morning, when the doors first opened, and around four fifteen, just before closing, when the procrastinating legal profession scrambled to avoid missing deadlines and malpractice suits. Over the course of seven years, Plato had acquired a considerable fund of practical understanding, based as it was on a vantage point from which he could follow the natural history of lawsuits from thundering advocacy in the early filings to meek, quiet, disinterested settlement at the bitter end.

“A Miz Adams on line four,” the City Hall operator would say disapprovingly, and Plato would take a deep breath, check to see if Mae Wan was, uncharacteristically, distracted with work, take a deep breath, and pick up the phone.

Before he could say anything:

“No extended absence yet, huh Plato? Still on the job, still slinking around behind my back, still lying and cheating with someone new, huh? What happens when she finds out you got a few loose ends you haven’t cleaned up yet, huh Plate-brain? What then?”

Plato had taken the precaution of placing the receiver on the ear farthest from Mae Wan, who sat about six feet away behind her gray metal desk, but the only effect of this was to involve his head as an amplifying gourd for the Volume Ten recriminations coming through loud and clear. Mae Wan looked up and gave just the slightest inscrutable smile.

“For a filing like that, I’d recommend coming in by four, I could be there to meet you. Here, to meet you. Or closer to five-thirty.”

“You fucking be here then or tomorrow it’s all day long, sucker, you read me?”

“Sure, Mr. Slamgold, that’s when it will be.”

Mae Wan smiled a little more obviously as she said, “How can anyone file anything at five-thirty, Plato? We close at four-thirty, you know.”

“It’s uh, it’s uh…what the fuck difference does it make what it is,” Plato mumbled.

Plato stopped by a Powell Street florist on his way to Sheila’s apartment and picked up a nosegay of iris and daffodil. He took the elevator up to her eighth floor apartment on Taylor Street and knocked on the heavy paneled door about five forty-five. It was a classy building. Sheila’s apartment was the residuum of a twelve-year marriage to a prominent San Francisco gynecologist, socialite, piano-and-photography amateur whom she had met while he was on the job, in 1988. Eventually, or so Dr. Mellerman said, the constant close-quarters inspection and manipulation of female anatomy dulled his sexual passion to the point where he could not bear to be around a woman in his off-hours. This pronouncement followed suspiciously close on the heels of a photography expedition to Thailand, Sheila noticed, so she wasn’t altogether surprised when Pad Nuan took up her conspicuous place in Dr. Mellerman’s life. She was young, lithe, black-haired and schooled in arts which allowed the man as much sexual satisfaction as he could possibly handle without coming anywhere near the female anatomy.

Sheila opened the door slightly and smiled coquettishly at Plato, then opened it widely to reveal the gleaming expanse of dark hardwood which led to the living room overlooking the Bay. It also revealed her short red dress, black high heels and tasty expanse of late-forties legs encased in subtle fishnet. If a higher duty had not been calling Plato so insistently, this would have been very hard to leave behind.

The view over the Bay took in the Bay Bridge and the Embarcadero skyline. Plato wondered again about the ability of women to take interior space and transform it into something so amazingly livable, so gleaming, balanced, efficient. He wondered at the subtleties of art, flowers, sideboards, sofa cushions, carpets, built-ins. Such a rich look, so far beyond the bricks-and-boards, Toulouse Lautrec poster motif he could not rise above. If only women were worth it, it would be so nice to live like this.

“A drink?” Sheila asked.

“Yes, Scotch, in a glass, a lot of it, no ice.”

She walked to the sideboard and poured a hefty slug into a Waterford tumbler, brought it to him.

“Sheila, you have to stop calling me at work.”

“You have to come to your senses, Plato. I have no intention of going quietly into that good night. And anyway, I don’t think this is really in your best interests either. What do you hope to accomplish?”

“I’m on the verge of taking you into my confidence, Sheila, if that’s what’s necessary. Something has come up that requires me to leave, for an extended period, as I’ve said. I need you to trust me. It does not really involve leaving you, per se. If you see what I’m trying to get at.”

She smiled noncommitally at him, sat in an upholstered armchair and crossed those long legs, revealing another six inches of voluminous thigh, more of the black lattice-work of the stockings, presumably going all the way up there, Plato realized.

“I wonder if you have any idea what you’re trying to get at.”

“I’m willing to return here after my mission is accomplished and to resume with you. I’m not averse to that.”

“You’re such a romantic fool, Plato. To think you’re not averse to resuming with me.”

He was a little thrown by the controlled intensity of her approach today, so unlike the glass-smashing encounter a week ago. He supposed this was the way it was with hysterics; you never saw the same spin two pitches in a row.

“I simply can’t go any further right now with an explanation. That has to be final, for your sake and mine. I recognize, however, that flitting from woman to woman may be no better an approach than remaining with one woman and working things through, more satisfying in some ways, and the strength of your feeling encourages me to think we could have the kind of commitment necessary to endure. Plus, ever since reading your profile on the Net, I’ve thought we might have that ‘soul mate’ quality that can be so elusive, so once-in-a-lifetime, if you know what I mean.”

She looked away, and the light of the equinoctial sunset burnished her well-formed profile. A handsome woman, Plato thought. He probably did underestimate her.

“I wonder if you mean that.”

“Just this once, indulge yourself in a little trust.”

“All right, Plato, I’ll do that. But for the health of your soul, you better not be bullshitting me.”

He rose and extended his hand to her, pulled her to her feet. He caught a glimpse of a crimson pressure oval beneath the fishnet of her right thigh as she uncrossed her legs. He loved details like that, the responsiveness of flesh to touch, how alive it all was. He took her in his arms, spoke softly in her ear.

“This is vital to me. Believe me, I knew nothing of this six months ago, and I’ve never misled you.”

“Don’t you want to stay?” she whispered. “Don’t you wonder where I might be going later, all dressed up like this?”

“I do, Sheila, but I’ve got to face there will be many nights like that in the coming months, and I’ve got to steel myself, beginning now. Please wait for me. I hope to be worth it.”