Hi. I’m looking forward to getting out on the mall this afternoon for a softball game but here are a few thoughts before I set to work on writing an op-ed for my actual paying job…
This looks ‘shopped. (h/t The Trotter. The Coach, when I sent it to him, said it most certainly is because “muzzle blasts from machine guns don’t look like that.”)
So, at risk of being uber-nerdy, can I just say that for the first time since I moved to DC I feel optimistic that a sea-change in political and philosophical thought is actually possible here given Walker’s recall survival in Wisconsin. It will be interesting, if things go down in November the way they look more and more likely to go down every day, to see what the city feels like next year because all I know is a place where the very young and very ill-informed have been emboldened for the past four years to be utter, raging, irresponsible selfish asswipes. I wonder if the air will feel different. The Coach says not to get too optimistic too early. But I can’t help it. I think what happened in Wisconsin is so revealing. I mean, Wisconsin is not Georgia. They are blue, traditionally and holistically. And they elected Walker not once, but twice. And don’t even get me started on the “but Barret was outspent!” garbage. Wisconsin law governing recall elections allows for a loosening of campaign contributions for the candidate being recalled. So yes, Walker could raise a lot more money. Because the unions got out there and went door to door having people sign a petition to recall him. As I saw it said on Twitter: “The unions picked a fight and they lost.” And now they’re crying about it.
Also, they ended up pitching in what some reports estimate is close to $21 million so they closed that spending gap from 10 to 1 to about 2 to 1. But watching MSNBC as the results rolled in, which the Coach and I did while chatting over gchat, you didn’t hear anything about that. But Lord was MSNBC edifying to watch. I had no idea — I mean literally no idea — how bad it actually is. I mean, these guys were so detached from reality it was actually scary — and hilarious. Maddow calling Walker a “radical”, Schultz mad at the boys upstairs for calling the race so early (uh, he was up by something like 100,000 votes 45 minutes in. It was done, man. Accept it.), O’Donnell continuously using the phrase “squeaked by” referring to Walker’s win. I mean, I have conversations (or try to. Lately it’s been harder and harder because I’m afraid of losing IQ points) with people who are quite liberal in their political philosophy but that beat all I had ever seen. I haven’t watched that programming in some time so I had forgotten. Now, Fox News was clearly pretty biased in their coverage as well — there’s no debate about where Hannity comes down on these things — but I never got the feeling that they might come out of their skin for joy over what they considered a win. The MSNBC crowd was beside themselves. So. Weird.
In any event, thanks to my sister Juli, I think I have a pretty good idea why Walker “squeaked” past Barrett. This article that Juli sent postulates that the American heart and mind disallows complete defeat. We don’t like it. And when the situation gets as bad as it’s gotten, we rebel. It’s just who we are. So, to this author the evil empire is the Chicago machine. Not all that surprising really. One last thing, with all the reports of Romney raising more money than Obama this past month, look for screams of how big money is buying the election in the coming days and weeks.
As an aside and apropos of nothing, I get the biggest kick out of dudes who are so passionate about abortion and making sure women have that choice. I don’t know why but it cracks me up. It always sounds like such bullshit, like the guy is just interested in impressing some chick he’s either currently having at (gotta make sure she understands that he’s cool if she has to get an abortion. “I totes support your choice, baby. Wanna go somewhere quiet and hit it?”) or in trying to appear all sensitive and enlightened and blah, blah, bleah. Digressing.
Thanks Henke. This was pretty interesting. Sometimes I wonder if I decided to disappear if anyone would try to find me…Here’s the conclusion.
I’m starting to really like this band.
More markers and hints for November.
Yep.
In praise of misfits.
And here’s why misfits are awesome.
A friend of mine has just decided to have an Olympics Party — my God how I love to watch Olympic swimming. Seriously, one of the greatest things in the world — and I think I’m making these.
Coda — Ray Bradbury
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?
A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?
Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”
The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ’em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito – out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch – gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer – lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like – in the finale – Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention – shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending them rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from the book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.
“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premiers as an opera in Paris this autumn. But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play – it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with baseball bats if the drama department even tried!
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men), Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count line and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.
For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.
All you umpire, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
Let me know if you find it.
The Koch Foundation just dropped off cupcakes in our office. Those bastards.
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