Arrival

And then here is arrival…

Envision it as follows: she is driving the car. You are in your little truck. Because her sense of direction is better (you have a tendency to dream behind the wheel, to think of other things, and so miss exits), she leads the way. Even though she has never taken this route before.

And as you drive, you consider. How long has it been since you've come this way? Along 40 from the east? It is the ancient Route 66, celebrated in song and story.

Could it be forty years? Quite likely.

In any case, you drive. You have driven across the Texas border, through the uplands, the grasslands, the little towns, the small cities…some with fabulous names, evocative, exotic, and strange. Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, Clines Corners, Wagon Wheel, Moriarty…

And then just past Sedillo the road begins its winding way into the mountains, or rather the pass…Tijeras Canyon …that notch that lies between the Sandias and the Manzanita Mountains. Somehow, because you are busy driving, busy watching, particularly if it is dusk and you are tired, you do not notice that great gray and tree-covered mountain walls…almost cliffs going up around you. You don't notice until suddenly, least expected, they are everywhere…

Perhaps you notice the town … the town of Tijeras, itself…vest-pocket city, long and lean, its buildings and houses and the giant cement works between hilltops and mountain face…valley town, two-dimensional community, extending East and West, but there is no South nor North…

And then you are at the top. You arc over a mountain. And…

The city. Albuquerque.

It is best at night because then you see the lights stretching before you, below you, a vast field of neon and gems and incandescent street lamps, stretching from the shadows at your feet to the opposite horizon. (When you were a boy, when your parents took you driving at night, you would pretend you were a city in the sea, at the bottom of the ocean, or the dark side of the moon, and you were in a descending vehicle, submarine or lunar lander.)

But even in the daytime, or at the interface between afternoon and dusk, there is a certain magic in it, as you descend from the mountain and find yourself on a highway. You and she had hoped to stop just outside the city to regroup but she does not see the turnoff for Tramway Boulevard and so you follow her to Eubank.

She exits there and then pulls off at the first sign she sees that reads Café. She thinks you will be able to get coffee before you travel on to your father's house. You follow her into the parking lot. It is, you realize, The Owl Café. White building. Huge windows. And on the roof…an image. A statue. At first you think it is a cat. But then you realize it is an Owl. The Owl from the name. A huge owl's head, wide-eyed, beaked, great horned…

You stand in the parking lot for a minute. Then you walk to her as she emerges from her car. You embrace. You have made it.

You go into the Owl Café. You will discover, over time (because you will go back), that the coffee is…all right.

But the green chile burgers?

To die for.

Happy Holidays

I hope you had a merry Christmas, or whatever it is you celebrate.

Winds

I return, now, to talking about the trip here…that is, from Massachusetts to New Mexico.

*

Other scenes: moving through Kansas and Texas and encountering vast wind-farms—hundred of huge white turbines on towering masts, their blades rotating slowly or quickly in the wind.

I am told that they are not as innocent as some activists would have us believe. They are, after all, enormous constructions, taller than most buildings. And their turbine blades are vast. I'm further told they are a threat to birds and wildlife, and, under certain conditions (during storms, for example), to humans.

Yet, one thing is undeniable: their fabulous beauty…vast yet graceful, reed slender yet mighty.

Perhaps we need such things, even with their hazards, if such hazards truly exist. They remind us that nothing is unmixed. Loveliness is genuine, but it comes with a cutting edge…concealed or revealed…

And to know it, even briefly, is to know that, sooner or later, you will be bleeding.

Bleeding, but there's the rub of course. You will be back.

And you know it.

Of Sandy and Presidents

I haven't been posting here much for the last couple of months. There are several reasons for that. For one thing, I'm in the midst of a couple of very big projects and they are consuming almost all my time. For another, there have been so many important things going on the world—-first superstorm Sandy and then the election—-that my own little observations seemed almost fantastically unimportant…even ridiculous.

But, I can't help tooting my own horn just a wee bit. You'll recall that in my last entry I wrote about climate change requiring an interventionist government.

Well, in some ways I think that's exactly what a majority of the American voters decided in the 2012 presidential contest. They saw Sandy…the world's most horrific campaign volunteer…in all its hideous fury. They saw FEMA and the rest of the Federal government reacting with amazing speed to deal with the storm's destruction. And, maybe most of all, they saw Chris Christie and President Obama side by side…like a pair of titans…working to restore New Jersey to the living.

(Those amazing photos of the two men, burying their differences to do real good, may have won the election for the President all by themselves. And, of course, whatever the photos left undone, Christie's praise of his new friend and partner finished.)

I think a lot of people saw all that and wondered…would a government headed by Romney, and controlled by ideologues opposed to federal intervention on any level have done the same?

Thus, if I did not call the election, I think I identified one of the mechanisms that determined the winner. It is a small triumph, but these days I'll take anything I can get.

More on the pundit…

As I drove away, I wondered if the pundit, in all his erudite cynicism, really understood the implication of his statement. If climate change is happening, and if we have no choice but to "get used to it," well, that is going to require a lot of effort, time, and money on the part of a lot of people. In fact, it is probably going to require considerable government spending.

Or to put it another way, my pundit, in all his libertarian logic, was in fact arguing for the very sort of government—activist, regulatory, a welfare-state—which he has built a career out of opposing.

Other memories...

Other memories, mostly confused: searching for motels and hotels that were "pet friendly" Oreo, our dog, you see), searching for restaurants with patios and al fresco dining (the dog under the table with a bowl of water and a snack, us up above wilting in the sun), generally not finding such restaurants and so picnicking along the way in the shade of a tree or a dumpster.

Meeting remarkable people: the farmer/used car dealer who let us eat lunch on his property, the enormous bearded biker in black leather who took a great liking to Oreo and told us how wonderful, kind and loyal is that marvelous beast the dog. Better than humans. Who will betray you to your enemies. Or the law.

Enormous storms: lightning blasts from the highest of the high right down to the ground at your feet, black rolling clouds which (at one point) turned into the dreaded funnel and did some real damage in the town we had just left.

And heat. Heat. The great shimmering terrible heat of the drought.

*

Moving through Kansas was fascinating and terrible. The summer of 2012 was a summer of drought. You would drive through fields and fields of corn…blasted dead, withered, leaves brown and wrinkled as parchment. It was hard for the farmers. It will be hard for many others in terms of higher prices for food.

In one little town we stopped for lunch. Again, we couldn't find a place to eat where we could take the dog. But there was a little park, sort of in the very center of the community. We got sandwiches at a Subway, took out our folding chairs, and ate outdoors.

I say it was a "park," but envision nothing green. Nothing verdant or living. The grass was brown and dry. It was even brittle, for lack of a better word. You could touch it and it would not spring back.

Then, to add a touch of biblical plague to the scene, there were huge grasshoppers everywhere. Great horned locusts, like something out of Exodus. You would move or take a step and they would bound off in every direction, startling the dog who would try to pursue them, then fall back confused and maybe even a little afraid.

We ate our lunches and left.

I remember this incident clearly because shortly before it happened I'd heard on the radio that a certain and intelligent Right-Wing pundit had apparently said something along the lines of, "Global Warming is happening. Get used to it."

It was an interesting remark. It conceded that climate change is underway, yet did not extend the cause for that to human activities. Further, rather by implication, it suggested that even if climate change were due to the combustion of fossil fuels, well, that was the price for the modern world.

There may be something to the idea, I don't know.

And yet…

It did strike me as I looked out upon the brown waste that it is easy to say such things when you are sitting in an air-conditioned office, knowing that a chill drink is only a short walk to the fridge away, and knowing too that you are wealthy enough to afford significant increases in your food budget.

The rest of us… that's a different story.

About UVA

…it is one of the few colleges in America I've seen that genuinely has a touch of Oxford to it. Most of our schools do not have that…not even Harvard and Yale, both of which tried so hard to be our national equivalent, our place of spires and Thames, medievalism and brick, gowned scholars and merry undergrads in straw hats gone punting…

But Yale, Harvard, others…they never quite got it. For all their struggles, they became simply urban schools. Oh, excellent schools of course, full of brains and ambition. But city universities all the same.

And the merry undergrads? The scholars in black robes? They grow more rare with every passing day. Replaced, you see, by striving careerists, professionalists, specialists… heads full of facts and performance enhancing drugs (Nootropics, I think the word is)… for whom the concepts of merriment and medievalism, let alone punting, seem genuinely ridiculous.

These others, these new men and women, they are what society says it values. They will succeed. They will go far.

But, I wonder, sometimes, will there ever come a time when these chill and perfect creatures, so hard and so strong, will awaken to the haunting question…

What is life for?

Son Rise In Charlottesville

For me, the high point of the trip was visiting my son, David, and seeing his new digs. He has recently begun a graduate program at the University of Virginia. We met him at Charlottesville and he gave us a tour of the town and the school.

It was fascinating watching him, listening to him…conducting us through lecture halls and workshops, displaying the models and scale drawings, explaining the 3D printers and CNC machines.

And thus the thing occurred which happens to every parent at some point, or several points…

The question …

From whence came this confident young man? This familiar stranger? And where did he gain these astonishing talents?

Something different...the trip

I'm going to take a break from writing about the Home. I will come back to it. But, something different for now.

I realize that I have not said much (or, really, anything) about the trip here…our drive from Massachusetts to New Mexico. That's partly because I've left that to Martha, whose own blog goes into much more detail about the trip (see "Traveling West," at mttucker.blogspot.com), and does so in a much more interesting way than I could manage.

But, it's also because the trip simply didn't register much for me. I'm not sure why. When I think about it, all I can recall is a succession of highways, trucks and cars, sixteen wheelers and fast food restaurants.

It is rather surprising. I'm usually a more thoughtful traveler than that. But not this time. All I could seem to think about was the road, the traffic, and keeping Martha in sight (she was in the car, I was in my little truck with our dog, Oreo).

Yet, here and there, an idea did force its way into my otherwise well-armored brain.

So…

Vistors (4)

Fourth: last.

One final visitor. The guest who never leaves.

The invisible one.

He is here most well-behaved. Never melodramatic. Never crude. No splashes of red, no scarlet patterns to be observed. No. He is gray and quiet. In his way, I suppose, a gentleman. He regrets the inconvenience of the hour. The failure to phone ahead.

And then the ambulance comes without a siren. Leaves at a leisurely pace. There is, after all, no hurry.

In the morning, of course, one sees a single red flower in a vase on the desk near the nurses' station. There is also a note in a calligraphic font saying something about loving memory and listing a name.

And the faithful Mr. Carlos, that excellent man, is in the vacant room with his industrial carpet cleaner, removing all traces of stain…

All memory of presence.

Visitors (3)

Third set: the irregular.

"It is a lonely place," my father says, meaning the Home.

Most of the patients receive few visitors. Time and circumstance prevent it. Time and trouble consume us. If my father were still working, he would not have the days to attend to her. If I were still in Massachusetts, if I had not been able to move, then I could never visit her for an hour every day. Most people, even the most well-meaning, the most attentive, the most compassionate, must make trade-offs. If it is a question of the grandparent or the child, the present or the future, we know which must be selected.

And if they are not compassionate. If they are not well-meaning. If the daughter or the son is, shall we say? challenged in terms of empathy or even sense of simple obligation, well, then…

"It is a lonely place," my father repeats, this time meaning the world. In its fullness. And its chill.

Visitors (2)

The Second sort of visitor is the semi-regular.

This is the group that comes on a regular basis, but does not stay as long. This is me, for example. I live across the street from the Home. So, each morning, I walk over and see her (and my father) for an hour to ninety minutes.

I'm not the only one, of course. There are others. A brother who comes to see his elder sibling (a stroke, I think, or a fall) at least every other day. Adult children of this or that surviving parent. A nephew.

We come. We do our best. I, for instance, read a lot to my mother. She was fond of mystery stories. On the table beside her now are Tony Hillerman (Hunting Badger), Henning Mankell (The Dogs of Riga), Dorothy L. Sayers (Whose Body?), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express)…

I read and I read. She seems to listen. Seems to enjoy the sound of my voice. May, indeed, attend to the stories.

Which is good. Though, I think, my other purpose is as important, or more so. That other purpose is my father. When I look and see him in the padded chair beside the bed, and I realize his eyes have closed, and all his enormous burdens have if only for the moment been forgotten, when he sleeps …

I know I have won. I have triumphed. I have achieved something, however small, of genuine virtue.

The Visitors (1)

One last group I shall discuss…my own. The Visitors.

People who come to visit the patients fall, again, into distinct categories. At the top end, the rarest, are the super-regulars. These are individuals who come all the time. They are present every day without fail, and usually for the whole day. They are, as a result, as much a part of the community as the Staff and the patients themselves.

At the particular Home where my mother is there is only one Super, and that's my Dad. He appears inevitably between eight and eight-thirty, goes to her room and waits, speaking to her, reading to her, stroking her hand and her head. He remains there until about one o'clock in the afternoon, then he will go and have lunch and take care of whatever business he needs to transact. After that, very often, depending on circumstances, he will return to the Home in the late afternoon and stay until early evening.

As I say, the Staff is in awe of him. He is their romantic hero, I think. The Man Who Is Always There For Her. The Man Who Never Gives Up. The little man, the frail man, the old man…who is, under it all, under all the illusions of weakness…

Constructed of steel and silver.

The Patients Are…

…surprisingly quiet. They make little noise.

Of course there exceptions. The woman in the bed in the room next to my mother's who called out regularly, monotonously, once a second, like the pained turning of the smallest hand of the clock, Help. Help, Help. A nurse would appear. The sound would stop for ten minutes to an hour. Then resume.  To whom did she appeal and why? I never knew. She was simply gone one morning. And her voice, her call, her understated panic vanished with her.

Then there was the man down the hall. I never saw his face. His room was shadowed. I saw him in the bed. The covers up to his chin. His face directed to the TV on the wall, but not (I think) seeing it. He, too, would call. In his case, a name. A woman's name. A wife perhaps? Someone already dead? (Or, worse, indifferent?) In any case, whoever she was, she did not come. He was not comforted. And one day too his room was empty. The ambulances appear as a rule at night, you see. They are not perceived.

But, for the most part, they…the patients… are quiet. In their beds. In their chairs. Terribly quiet.

*

There are three sorts. Patients I mean. There is the non-ambulatory sort. The people who never leave their beds. Or, if they do, then it is only through the intervention of nurses and aides and machines…for example, a device that is somewhere between a large sling and a small forklift. It lefts them up, out, swings them away from the miraculous inflating/deflating bed that fights bedsores and brings them, gently as possible, into the wheeled chair. Then, after a sojourn in the sun or the front office, it swings them back again.

My mother is one such.

The second sort: The semi-ambulatory. These come and go with rather greater ease. They do not spend the whole day prone. They are assisted out of their beds into their chairs and then rolled about to various destinations—the large front room, where the nurses or aides read to them; the dining area where they are given their meals (if they can feed themselves), various functions here and there, sometimes to the little Van that takes them on outings. The State Fair, for example.

The third sort: The fully or at least mostly ambulatory. They are here for recovery from some devastation or another. A fall perhaps. A shattered hip. A replaced knee. Pneumonia. They move about the halls not in chairs but with walkers. In time, they may go home. To some home or another. Probably not to care entirely for themselves. But, perhaps with a home health aide. A daughter or son. Someone.

*

There is crossover between the three groups. Sometimes, rather improbably, (I hope, one day, my mother) the non-ambulatory will transit to the middle. One morning, one afternoon, a patient will show such improvement that they are able to move, to speak, to command the relative autonomy of their very own wheelchair. Perhaps even go home to the care of a family or of a personal attendant.

However, the more usual course (alas!) is the other way. Someone checks in expecting to be here only a few days, a week or so at most, just until they're "back on their feet." Only, it doesn’t happen that way. They do not regain their feet. Perhaps the feet do not regain their former function…instead weaken, blacken, must be amputated. The walker gives way to the chair. The chair to the bed. The bed to…well, where-ever it is that one goes to from there.

Which is an interesting thought, is it not? Could I perhaps have it backwards?

*

I wondered thus as I walked past a room today, one near my mother's. In it was a woman I've seen here before. She is ancient. Far older than either of my parents. Her hair is utter-most white. She is motionless. Has been motionless the last month.

She lies in her bed. She looks toward the ceiling. I've never heard her speak. The nurses switch off the lights. Apparently their brightness bothers her. What illumination there is in the room leaks from the window in the tight white projections (almost spectral) of a Venetian blind. Plus, there is, of course, the silver flicking of the obligatory television tuned to no station in particular. So all her flesh is pearl in color…hair, face, hands…while the body is clothed in the black of a coverlet that reaches to her chest.

She is the least ambulatory, the least mobile of anyone.

And yet. And yet. Somehow, I feel a kind of tension when I see her. A bowstring tautness. Something of the preparation. The moment without motion. The second before the anticipation. The waiting before the flash and the blur. The diver on the board. The gathering of nerve. The catching of the breath.  The strain. Then… action. The leap. Thus what is most without motion is the most in movement. The least mobile the most upon the wing.

And the woman, the others…they shimmer in their shadowed rooms, possess the illusion of silence, know however the great secret of stillness.

To wit, that it contains the flight. And within the breathless dim is discovered …the fury, the flurry, the exaltation…

The exit…

The child's laugh.

The final bell before the summer's boundless energy.

And speed.

 

The Staff

It can be complicated. There are multiple levels, multiple programs, different sources of funding, connections curving and twisting and sometimes quite Byzantine.

There are those who work with the patients directly, or who work in some fashion around them…nurses, RNs, PAs, Nurse's Aides, M.D.s, the custodial staff, the receptionists, the physical therapists, the speech therapists, the vocational therapists, the replacers of oxygen tanks, the emptiers of this and the fillers of that, those who man desks and those who pilot the wheelchairs to lunches of much softened meats and pureed vegetables…

And, as a rule, these people know my father. He is there so often. He is so friendly. So open. He greets them. He speaks to them. Asks about their families and their lives. They call him, "Mr. Tucker," even when he tells them he is "T.J." They check on him, they watch out for him, ask him about her, encourage him, even…in their way…protect him, or as much as they can in the chaos of the place and the time.

*

Then there is another level. These are the occupiers of front offices and the givers of bills. These do not see the patients, or not as much. These deal with the children or siblings or spouses or whoever it is that is deemed Responsible. Some of these, too, have a relationship with my Father. Something like friendship. He brings them a check once a month.

They have a game they play. He hands the women at her desk the check. She tries to take it. He pretends his fingers clamp shut and the paper cannot be removed by any means short of surgery. She giggles. He relents. The money changes hands.

*

Other layers, other complications. There is a layer of administrators who, in theory, also deal with the patients and their families, but whose actual contact with either may be rather minimal. They are, instead, the managers of those who do connect. They are not "in charge," exactly, but neither do they labor in the vineyards and fields. They hew not wood nor draw water, but they command those who do. They set not policy, but enforce it. In another sort of army, they'd be NCOs. Subalterns is, I think, the term employed by Those Who Know Important Things.

These we shall revisit.


*

Further still upwards. Managers.

Managers of the complex, some of whom have offices here. Most of whom do not. They are invisible. You will not see them. They have no interest in seeing you. They are the Great and the Powerful. The Oz. Behind the curtain. Silent and the Inevitable. The MBAs. Heaven's blest. Children of the King. Increasers of shareholder value. Those who made suburban parents and high school guidance counselors very, very happy.

These, too, we shall see again.

*

And all these women and men are present. These different strands. They connect, twine, interlink, form that most tentative and least natural but most common of all our modern communities…a workplace. The Office. No worse than most. Better than many.

Yet, I wonder, for you see the Others…the patients…they too are present daily. But, they are not permanent. They, the patients, occupy the beds and the chairs, are wheeled into the sunshine on pleasant days, are left in front of the televisions when there is rain. They are tended to. They may be here for years.

But, ultimately, sooner or later, and usually sooner, they…the patients…they have other appointments. Some recover from some distressing ailment and are able to live at home. Others, most, the majority, they, well, shall we say? it is best left unsaid. Insert silence here. An inevitable silence. Perhaps meditative. Perhaps even to be wished. If not to be hurried. But a silence.

On the other hand they…the staff…they will remain. Coming in each morning. Leaving each evening. Thirty minutes for lunch. Tasks large and small repeated ad infinitum. Gossip around the proverbial water cooler. Small friendships which would not normally form and will not last the change of jobs or position. Enmities which are deathless and eternal. Our normal lives.

And I wonder, then, whose story this really is. Who are the genuine residents? Whose home is, in fact, the Home?

Who, in the end, is fixed? The flies in amber?

And who the free?

Room

Her room.

It is easily envisioned. Not cramped, but not large. Comfortable but not personal. What you expect of life in an institution. Thus:

1) Her bed: a technical marvel. It is inflated. It rises and falls and shifts positions all by itself. This to fight bedsores. At the foot of her bed is a machine that contains controls and an air pump. It huffs and it puffs and moves the mattress according to some mysterious and complicated algorithm of its own. We ignore it. It ignores us. We are thus, man and machine, united in indifference to one another.

2) Entertainment: twin TVs on the wall, one of her, one for a potential roommate. Turned on by the nurses and aides. They show Sesame Street, Elmo and Bert and Ernie, The View, Celebrity Chefs, DIY shows, rebuild your house in seven easy days (she was a great fan of home construction. Putting in a ceiling or installing sheet rock was a pleasure to her, and a hardware store more fun than a candy shop)…sometimes adventure movies, science-fiction, Men In Black is a fav. She watches it. Her eyes open. Not quite staring. Not quite anything else.

3) Decoration: Mostly photos, and mostly on the wall in front of her. There is a collage of family scenes my wife put together on cardstock—assorted images, some familiar, some strange. My father in a heavy jacket, standing tall against some distant winter's snow. Her and him at the beach. Texas, I think. My son as a child. The dogs. We show them, the pictures, to her. She looks at them. She does not change expression.

4) Medical devices: A metal stand next to her bed supporting a plastic bag. It contains the chalk-brown fluid that is her nutrient; a long tube aches down to the insertion point in her stomach. Another, similar tube snakes down from under her bedclothes to the catheter balloon where it hangs under her bed, filling laboriously, drop by golden drop.

5) Flowers: Or, rather, flowering plants in pots on the windowsill. One is dead but remains, dry, yellow, straw-like but somehow still clinging to shape and color, like a dried herb. One lives, after a fashion. It is something we bought at the grocery store and bought to her. ("Wait, wait," she said, when I showed her the plant and to my amazement she reached for it, would let not me take it away, not until she had brought it to her chest and held it between clinched fists.) It sits on the sill and I water it when I remember. The flowers droop. Grow brown.

6) Dressers: two, one beside her bed, the other across the room from it. They, along with the little closet at the end of the room, hold her clothing, folded or hung. Also medical supplies, spare Foley balloons, plastic tubing, adult diapers, a dozen other things industrial and gray.

And last.

7: The Window…

Only one of those, but it is beside her bed. It looks out into the parking lot but also beyond it. Look up, look over the parked cars, over the little bus that takes the seniors on their outings, over the pickups of the lawn crew, over the vans making their deliveries of oxygen tanks and processed meals, over the ambulances that appear without sirens and carry their sheeted burdens out the back, over all of that and …you will see the mountains.

The mountains.

The Sandias. Blue in the morning. Rose at sunset. Reaching up from the mesa. Enormous. Vigorous. Glorious. A promise.

A Certainty.

Scent

If those others are not, then what is the dominant sense in the Home?

Strangely, I think it is scent. You smell things. You return to those first origins of life, when chemical sensitivity was all-important. When molecules and olfactory receptors defined perception. And communication. With their own grammar and poetry.

It is not all good. Very little of it is sweet or mellow. You detect…cleaners, harsh and abrasive, bland food on the trays being taken on carts to those patients who can sit and eat; medical smells, disinfectants, the electronic-hot-metal odor of clinical machines; very few perfumes or personal scents unless they're on the skins of visitors; and, most of all…

Urine.

It is not that the place is unclean. No. It is very, very clean. But urine is a powerful scent. And the Foley catheter is not a perfect technology. (Note to transhumanists and others who long for the blending of man and machine, partisans of cyborg and superhuman, there is much remaining undone, long miles to be traversed 'tween here and your utopia.).

And so, as you walk past a patient or a patient's room, you will detect urine. Sometimes, too, feces, if they are having a bowel movement.

You get used to it. You don't think you could, but you do. And if you are of a certain mental bent there is something instructive in it. Almost comforting. For, you see, these are also the scents of the nursery. Of the maternity ward. Cycle of life, etc. I'm sorry if that strikes you as platitudinous. Perhaps it is. But it is also true. And inescapable.

Besides, it is humbling. We go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from uric acid and methane to uric acid and methane. Even the most remarkable among us comes, in time, to here. The most powerful, the most arrogant, the most supercilious, the most talented …here. Here and nowhere else.

Oh ye mighty. Sniff upon these works and despair.

Or, better, learn modesty. And so wisdom.

Swimming

Sound, too, is not dominant, though for other reasons.

There is an attempt to muffle noises in the Home. There is soundproofing here and there, padding in the walls and so on. But it does not matter. Everywhere there is noise. Constant, grating, strident noise.

Everything is alarmed, you see. Open the wrong door, or the right one at the wrong time, and emergency alarms begin their incessant beepings. If a patient rolls over and hits the nurse's call button, more beepings, equally loud. If one of the machines that support the patients in their beds malfunctions or runs out of some necessary fluid, yet more beepings and bleatings.

And, of course, all the rooms have TVs, usually tuned to competing channels, and (given the viewers' almost inevitable deafness) usually quite loud.

Yet, after a day or so, you learn to tune out all this. It blurs away. Becomes indistinct. In time, it's all just white noise, and in a strange way, even serene.

Or, here's a better description. Go swimming. Put your head under the water. Listen, if you can, to the talk of other swimmers on the surface. What do you hear? It is reduced, of course. Their conversations dwindle, grow dim, are incomprehensible…

And somehow alien. As though you eavesdropped on strangers from a different world, far away and chill, where concepts are different, nothing quite makes sense, and communication…no matter how sincerely attempted…is impossible.

Yet, even so, there is hope to be had. It is in the knowledge that you will eventually rise, abandon the rushing waters, come again upon the tile and earth, feel the towel over your shoulder, the sun on your body, the warmth, the knowledge, hear again the spoken word…

Rendered coherent. And whole. And potent.

The Home

It is pleasant as such places go. A smallish building, tan and white and yellow, "southwestern colors"…you go through the front entrance, sign in at the desk, talk to whichever receptionist is on duty (there are two, they alternate)…then you go through the doors behind the desk (closed, difficult to open if you are seated in a wheel chair, deliberately so, reduces "risk of elopement").

You find yourself inside a large central space. The nurse's station is on your right. Hallways lead off to the patients' rooms in various directions. If it is morning, then many of them…I mean, the patients…will be in this central space. They are pushed there in their wheel chairs and one of the aides reads them the morning paper. You must, then, navigate a crowd of chairs and impassive men and women.

You find your way to one of the seemingly identical hallways (it is all too easy to get confused, to pick the wrong one, and have to return and start over again) and head toward the individual room you want to visit. My mother's is on the immediate right hand side, which makes it a little easier.

It's funny. As I think about it, I realize that vision is not the dominant sense there. Things seem a little smooth, a little bland, a little hazy. The beige rugs, the earth tone walls, the subliminal blues which are almost gray, the uniformity of the furnishings, give the place a curiously unseeable quality. It is not invisible, you are not blinded, but you somehow cannot recall looking at anything in particular. Nothing specific. It is as though someone wrapped your face with gauze and you perceive the world indistinctly, as through a veil.

Which perhaps is fitting. Maybe that is the way the patients in their chairs also see the world. Veiled. Awaiting that moment in the ceremony when the music swells, union is achieved, the veil is lifted, and all things are made once more new and crystalline.

I like that. It is a comforting image. True or not, I shall choose to believe it. Forsaking all others.

Besides, there are moments when something like that truly seems to happen. Albeit on a smaller scale. When, say, you are picking your way carefully through the chairs, the old men and the old women, and one of them looks at you for just a moment, and you smile, and to your surprise one of them smiles back…

For a second, a split second, it is as if the sun reaches through shuttered windows.

All shadows are banished. Your sight is incalculably clear. 

how much of her remains?

And her?

She speaks sometimes. Not a great deal. I don't know how much she recognizes me. She will smile. She will respond to my questions, at least on occasion. Usually, it is just "yes" or "no." Sometimes we will get a full sentence.

She moves her hands. With some help, she has even fed herself. She has a great fondness for soft ice cream. And my father brings her mashed sweet potatoes, which she also seems to love.

I wonder, sometimes, when I watch…when I watch those beautiful, luminous eyes of hers…how much of her remains. How much of the woman I knew and loved and admired?

My nightmare is that she is still in there, someplace, unable to speak, unable to move…raging against the dying of the light.

Such a thing is not to be considered. It would be kinder if she were not there at all…if she had, somehow, moved on to whatever place it is that awaits us…(insert the image of the celestial sphere, the blue crystal dome of heaven, turned by mystic clockwork engines …and she, the traveler of the tarot deck, comes, pauses, considers, passes on, through the boundary of What Is, sees what we may not yet perceive…)

Kinder, yet harder, for it would mean she would never return to us.

And there is part of me, hopeless yet ever hoping, that it is only a matter of time, or reconnections, or resumed neural linkages, and one day…maybe after many summers…there will come the morning…

The morning she looks out into the room. Sees her husband. Smiles. Says Thank you for waiting. Reaches for his hand.

colossus

As a rule, I see my mother once a day. I get up, walk the dog, have breakfast, then head over to the nursing home. My father will be already there. He spends the morning there, and sometimes much of the afternoon. He comes and sits by her bed, speaks to her, plays her music on a little stereo he bought on eBay, and (most of all) watches out for her.

They are in awe of him. I mean, the staff at the home. He is there every day. Rain or shine. Snow or sleet. He is there. He comes and is with her. He is her companion. Her guardian. Her support. No matter what.

If you saw him, not knowing, you would see a very small man, very old, wearing ill fitting clothing that we can never get him to change, his hair unkempt…

You would dismiss him.

You would be wrong to do so.

Remember the saying about entertaining angels unaware? With him, it is the titan that is concealed. The giant. The more-than-man.

How frail the flesh. How fragile the bone. But perceive him correctly. You will see the monolith. The shimmering entity. The colossus at the edge of cosmos. The gaze which seeks the infinite.

And will, in time, obtain it.

A certain spectrum...

And so I begin again.

It has been months since I've done anything with Xcargo. I have some excuse. As you know, we moved to New Mexico this summer. My mother had a stroke—a second one, actually—and my father is elderly. Someone had to be here. And that was me. Or, rather, Martha and me.

If circumstances were different, if we came for other reasons, we'd be quite happy. Martha was retiring from Tufts, anyway. What I think of as my career is entirely portable. I can do it via computer and the web. Our son is now going to school in Virginia. There was, in short, increasingly little to hold us to Massachusetts. Why stay and fight the winters?

Thus, we came, and we are glad to be here. Or mostly so. The qualifier of the mostly being, of course, our motivation. The reason for our coming. The illness. The stroke. The slow and incomplete dying of the brain.

Alas, you see, the quality of contentment has something of the nature of physics. Between the quantum of the consequence and the shimmer of the cause, there is a certain spectrum which, like the rainbow, is constructed by the breaking of the light. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, one taken from the falsity of vacuum, then consider the virtual pair. Whose life is beautiful but brief.

Begun in nothing. And ended there.

B and B's transgression

As you know, I work with a small epublisher called Belfort & Bastion. Here's a entry to B&B's editorial blog which I just posted. You can see the original here. Or you can just read it below.


Here come the Transgression…


In the next few weeks, we're going to be introducing a new category of works to the Belfort and Bastion catalog. Specifically, we are going to be offering you works of Transgressive literature and art.

Which should, of course, invoke in you a certain response. You should, at this moment, be sitting there in front of your laptop, your hand on that cup of mocha-grande, and be asking yourself, "What the hell do they mean by that?"

A damn fine question.

Unfortunately, we're not too sure ourselves.


*

It seems odd that there should be any question of what "transgressive literature," or "transgressive fiction" is. There's a whole section on it at Wikipedia. That wise source informs us, "Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime."

All well and good.

But, come, let us be honest. Most of the time, and for most people, transgressive literature has meant just one thing. 

Sex.


*

It used to be that you could say what was "transgressive" without a whole lot of effort. It meant a dirty book. Or, if you prefer, porn or erotica.

And that was a good thing…for publishers and writers. It meant you could be daring and new (and extremely salable) by simply throwing in a few words like "dick" or "cunt" or "boob" or whatever. And, if you weren't particularly talented, well, terrific. Lack a plot or sense of character. No problem. A little sex here and there, plus a lurid and leerworthy cover on the paperback version, and who cared? I mean, really?

And if you could write…if you actually had talent…ah, so much the better. It meant that people like Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anne Desclos (a.k.a., Pauline Réage), Anaïs Nin, etc. could (like De Sade) smuggle ideas under the cover of smut into a greater public's otherwise unresponsive intellect.

Of course, it was a dangerous game. The endless court cases, the imprisonments of artists and writers, the unwelcome attentions of the world's Anthony Comstocks great and small…these were real threats.

But, until recently, you knew what was illicit to say. You knew what could not be said. You knew what was considered unspeakable.

Alas, that is no longer the case.


*

Sex was the lodestone of the unspeakable right through the 1970s. But after that …well, the erotic gradually faded from the transgressive. It became less taboo. Less dangerous. Less important.

That was, of course, because sex was no longer quite the problem it had once been. Unwanted pregnancy is a serious thing, and not just for the mother or the child. Societies, particularly but not exclusively pre-modern ones, are not fond of children who must somehow be supported without the co-operation of at least two adults. Preferably more. Hence, again particularly but not exclusively in pre-modern societies, marriage becomes a vital economic institution, and sex outside that institution becomes a sin. And discussion of sex outside marriage becomes a crime.

But contraceptives change all of that. Suddenly, extramarital sex becomes relatively consequence free. Yes, you run risks. You have your share of "illegitimate pregnancies." You have diseases, including quite serious ones, likes HIV. But, on the whole, sex becomes "casual." Even recreational. Indeed, it becomes the norm.

And, in the process, porn looses its sting. It becomes just another middle class industry.


*


Today, of course, there is nothing transgressive about porn. Except for the most obviously wantonly and hideous acts (rape, child abuse), there is not a form of sex that isn't portrayed quite freely in the market. Straight, Gay, oral, anal, group, solo, with dolls, toys or sheep …you name it, it's out there. 

The Dominatrix in her black leather catsuit bounds about superhero movies for the entertainment and titillation of twelve-year-old boys. Her brooding male equivalent, in tight breeches and equipped with a riding crop, is to be found on the covers of bestsellers everywhere. Soap operas and sitcoms, meanwhile, discuss role-play and pegging and mammary intercourse. Talk shows provide tips on the proper methods of bondage and the correct pronunciation of Bukkake.  Oh, and if you have questions about what "tea-bagging" is, or how one performs a "turkey slap," well, these things are nicely covered in the some 85 pages (and counting) of Wikipedia that deal with different sex acts.

Yes…of course, yes…there are still barriers and taboos. There are still places and times where one had better not raise, as it were, the issue. Yet, come! Admit it. This is a new age. And there is no turning back… in spite of the best efforts of moralists and censor of every stripe, ranging from the religious fundamentalist to the radically feminist.

Sex has become all too commonplace. It's depictions are no more transgressive than images of eating, and considerably less so than those of defecation.


*

So, what is transgressive now?

I think there is a short and a long-term answer to that. The short-term answer is that we shall see sex itself questioned. After having been so long taboo, its current dominance in society invites critique. An age, after all, in which the Kardashians and the Real Housewives discuss the intimate details of their bedrooms on Reality TV (and their revelations are considered worthy of front page coverage), is by definition ridiculous.

We shall see, then, a class of literature exploring that fact. We shall see a type of book asking if the insertion of this or the extraction of that is really so exciting. Or, indeed, if it is worth remarking upon at all.

And Belfort and Bastion has two titles about to go online that might be said to fall into this category. The first of these is WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, while the second is The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante.

Both of these mock sex, or rather, they mock our cultural obsession with it. They do so, however, in very different ways.

To explain that, let me take them one at a time.


*

The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante, came into us via editor Victor Storiguard, who (as he puts it) "stumbled across" Mr. Amante's blog-based webfiction some time ago (you can see it at bradamante75.blogspot.com, by the way).

Amante writes science fiction and his book is, at first glance, nothing more than a piece of rather conventional space-opera, or rather "time-opera" since the main character visits the future. It concerns a young man, Robert, who has led a pretty wretched life in our own century, but who is then murdered for mysterious reasons.

However, he's frozen, and after five hundred years, he's brought back to life. In fact, he finds himself in a feminist utopia in which the sexes have completely changed roles. Women are tall and masterful. Men are small and delicate.

So far there's nothing here particularly transgressive. Sex-role reversal is a staple of sci-fi, and, indeed, in what passes for public discourse these days (think about the famous Newsweek issue, and the equally famous article in the recent Atlantic).

Ah, but here's where things get interesting. Robert, now a male ingénue named "Bobbi," has rather a lovely time. He's petted and pampered and wooed and won by dozens of beautiful superwomen, all of them desperate for his favors.

Women, on the other hand, well, they discover that being on top isn't quite the bowl of cherries they thought it would be.

And, this, of course, is the transgression. What the author is saying is simply this: the great and much ballyhooed Battle of the Sexes…the battle over sex, the battle during sex…is in the end irrelevant. The victory is uncertain, the victor unclear, the triumph …

Doubtful.


*

WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, meanwhile, is perhaps a more subtle work. In it, Tannhauser presents us with the life and loves of Jacob Lamdan, a young man who wants nothing more than to be a famed author of well-crafted erotica.

And this should be a snap for Lamdan. He's a decent stylist and he's got scads of personal experience from which to take his material. He is, you see, one of those young men that women perceive as beautiful, no matter how they really appear. Where the rest of us poor heterosexual males (particularly those who are, as they delicately say, of a certain age) must struggle and sweat to gain even the passing attention of women, Lamdan gets it whether he likes it or not. They fall into his arms at the least excuse. They offer him sexual escapades that would embarrass Caligula. Indeed, they demand his attentions with a single-minded fury. (We have here something of Amante's Bobbi, do we not?)

But, Jacob discovers something distressing. To wit, his easily obtained sexual experiences provide no inspiration. They have required no effort, so they are not genuinely rewarding. They satisfy the animal, but they do not nourish the human part of him. He has no muses, only fuck-buddies and "friends with benefits."

In time, he finds that only by withdrawing from the sex may he save himself. In the process, he must confront both great unhappiness and real tragedy, but it is his route to salvation.

Which is, of course, how Mr. Tannhauser commits his own transgression. He takes the climax of every porn film, every romantic comedy, and every advertisement for underarm deodorant…i.e., the moment when boy-gets-girl and vice versa…and says, "It doesn't matter."

Doesn't matter. And maybe should be avoided.


*

So that's our two newest additions. And it is also my suggestion for short-term transgressions.

But what about the long? The other possibility I suggested? The second and more lasting sort of transgression.

That is complicated. And political. And for another day.

But, I will leave you with a clue. I hope it will be appropriately tantalizing.

It is a quote from Voltaire. It is: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

But let us change it. Let us say, instead, "whom you may not mock."

Three Books About Strangers

Okay, first some confessions. In the interest of full (or nearly full) disclosure, I'm about to write a blog entry about a book in which I've an interest. In my capacity as an editor of Belfort and Bastion (of which more later), I'm helping publish it.

That said, I think I'm objective enough to write about it with something more or less like a clear head. Or, as clear a head as I've ever got.

Still, you've been warned.



*

The book is Stranieri: Life among Italy's Tourists, Expats, and Immigrants by Tristan Gans. In theory, it is a personal memoir of a trip to Italy undertaken by Gans and his then girlfriend (now wife) Sarah. And, yes, I know both and count them as friends.

Anyway, as young college gradates in 2008, the two went merrily off to Italy to live for a spell. Specifically, they went to the little industrial city of Brescia, where Sarah had landed a job teaching English. Gans went along to compose music and, as he says, contemplate art.

So, at first glance, you could be excused for thinking this was yet another imitation of Eat, Pray, Love and all the other recent English-language bestsellers about finding one's self in exotic locations. And, to a certain extent, there really is a book here that's sort of like that. It concerns a young couple, in love, yet human and so prone to the occasional bit of friction, exploring their relationship someplace far from home.

Except, read a page or two, and you find that's not all that's going on. Tristan and Sarah aren't in for an endless summer of love in the Tuscan sun. They find themselves instead in a grimy little industrial city, where the locals are for the most part unfriendly and inaccessible, and the only real connections they can make are with other foreigners.

Ergo, you have another book in this work, this one about the Stranieri from which the title comes.  Gans thus contemplates the Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, South Asians, North Americans, etc., who have made Italy their home (in spite of the objections of the Italians).

And a wild and wonderful crew they are. We have, for instance, Asad the Pakistani (maybe Gay, maybe not) who runs the international calling center in the neighborhood, and who becomes Gans' first real friend in Italy. Then there's Donnie Columbo, an Italian-American who's come to the land of his forefathers, discovered he is regarded by the locals as the most alien of aliens, and who has therefore embraced and exaggerated his Americanness to promote his business as a kind of cultural broker.

And there are others, some named and some not, but always present and always providing the services, labor, and energy which the Italians cannot seem to produce for themselves. Gans' sympathies are clearly and overwhelmingly with these people. He prefers them to the locals and he watches with no little fascination as they increasingly control vital sections of the economy. What will Italy be, he wonders, and how will Italians react, when they find they have been outclassed by their own guest workers?

So we have that book, that second book from Gans. It is the story of the New Peoples of Italy, and is an excellent read for that reason alone.

Ah, but we are not finished yet. There's a third book lurking here. And it may be the most important of all.


*

Years and years ago, I read a review of Ryszard Kapuściński's The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, an analysis of the fall of Haile Selassie. Alas, I don't remember the author of the review. I'm not even sure where it appeared. The New York Review of Books? The Globe? Oh, well.

Anyway, in it, the reviewer began by noting that when he (or she) had first picked up the book, he'd thought it was about "well, Ethiopia." But, in fact, it wasn't about Ethiopia at all. It was about Kapuściński's native Poland, where the Communist regime was just about to implode.

And, guess what. We have a similar situation here. The third book in Stranieri is a self-portrait.

Of Gans, and his whole generation.


*

As I say, I know Gans. He is young. He also describes himself as "upper middle class."

But there's a lot wrapped up in that expression. "Upper Middle Class." It means a time, a space, a mindset, and an interesting place to be today, if you're young.

Not necessarily nice. But interesting. As goes the Chinese curse.


*

To be young in the Upper Middle is to be at the center of a perfect storm of expectation. It is to be in a place where everything…everything…is focused on "being a success," on getting high SAT scores, on being admitted to the "good schools." It is to be in a place where Ritalin is handed out to everything with a Y-chromosome, where there is a college prep franchise after-school program on just about every corner, and where achievement is everything and standardized tests are the word of God.

And Gans is the product of all that. He is one of those young people who came through the System…who has been taught by it that he must achieve greatness. Not just success. Not just a happy life. Not just a rewarding career. But greatness.

Absolute greatness.


*

When my father was young, his parents hoped that he would have "a nice life." They hoped that their children would not suffer a Depression, as they had, and that he would live the comfortable middle class life which had been so cruelly stolen from them in 1929.

My father, in turn, wanted something quite similar for me. He made it clear that I was to pursue whatever path it was that led to my happiness. If that meant being a writer, well, it was a tough job to get, and a harder one to make pay, but that was my choice. He would be in my corner.

And I think a lot of Baby Boomers, people my age, were told something similar. My parents were a bit more hippies than some, but they were not uncommon. Their hope for their children was that they be, well, comfortable. Maybe not greatly wealthy. But comfortable.

Ah, but consider what we…people my generation and a little after …have said to our own children.

Is it all right to be "comfortable?" To have "a nice life?" To live a middle class existence?

I don't think that's what we've said. I think the message we've given our children is that they are to exceed beyond our wildest expectations. They are the tools by which we express our most malignant narcissism.

Don't believe me? Try the following little test. Go to an affluent suburb and, if you can, engage a few parents in conversation. Ask them how they would react if little Johnny decided on a career as a plumber. Or if Tiffany proclaimed her intention to be a stay-at-home Mom.

As I say, ask the question. But you might be well advised to do so at a distance. And perhaps even then wear a bullet-proof vest.


*


Now, understand, there is nothing wrong with being a plumber or a stay-at-home mom. In fact, they can be rewarding professions. A good tradesman can earn over $100 an hour. And stay-at-home Moms (or Dads) can provide so many advantages to a family that their actual economic input may exceed that of the so-called "breadwinner." (Think of the cost that most families otherwise face in terms of things like child-care.)

But that's not enough, is it? To be successful in a rational, normal, healthy sense is simply not enough for us anymore.

What we want for our children…what we shall demand…is for them to be inhumanely accomplished. They are to be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or…well, you get the point.

But there's the rub. We can't all be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or whoever. We can't all be great. We can't all be stars.  This isn't Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average. Some of us, even if we are talented and wise and filled to the brim with the best of ambitions, will fail.

And the vast majority of us…well, we shall never grandly fail nor grandly succeed. We shall just be… people.

For better or worse.


*

What this means, though, is that a vast number of young folk—those of Gans' age, class, and origins—are doomed to misery.

They cannot help but be so. They have been trained, programmed, indoctrinated from their earliest youth with the idea that they are obliged to achieve greatness. I don't mean that they think they can achieve it. I don't mean they think they will achieve it. I mean they are obligated to gain it. They are commanded to do so. They must.

And if they do not…

Then they are worthless.


*


I've wondered how we got into this weird mess. How did we come to this great, national neurosis by which we (or, at least, our middle and upper middle classes) act out Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child on a titanic scale.

I'm not at all sure. Though, I have wondered if it has something to do with media. We tend to take our role models from the people we know in our communities. Not so long ago, that meant the people we actually might meet—the town doctor, the local banker, the mighty president of the women's club.

But now, our "community" has expanded via the cinema, the TV, and the web to include the whole world. The banker, lawyer, and clubwoman have been replaced by Donald Trump and The Kardashians—people whose lives, celebrity, and conspicuous consumption are trumpeted to the heavens.

The obtainable is thus rejected. The only acceptable goal is what cannot actually be achieved.

And our children…they are condemned to the anguish of Tantalus, forever reaching, never acquiring.


*

And Gans has wised up.

During his long sojourn in Italy, watching what he suspects is the decline of the West (he is writing while the economic system melts down in 2008-2009), he's figured out that he's been sold a bill of goods. He's realized that no matter how hard he works, how dedicated he is, how talented he is…it isn't going to happen. 

He begins his story as a composer. He has internalized the idea that he must be the next John Cage, or even a Mozart. And he has done his level best. He is no slacker. And he is talented. His music is good.

But as he watches Italy and the world wrestle with the new realities of resource scarcity, oil depletion, the rise of China and India, the post-industrial scarcity of jobs, the appearance of strange new totalitarianisms…the general impoverishment of us all both economically and intellectually…

He sees the future.

It is surely no accident that as he ends the book, he is no longer planning on a career in music or the academy. His profession will be, instead, bankruptcy law.


*

And so, I think, Stranieri will be an important book. It is a corrective. It is a rebuttal. It is the voice of many, many young people who are just now waking up to the fact that they have been given goals that cannot be reached. And that other ends, which they have been told to despise, are not only better but perhaps the only ones possible in our curious and mutable age.

In fact, I hope it is the first example of a new literature—a kind of text in which our children hesitate before the TV, watch for a few moments while The Real Housewives obsess about fame and fortune and diamond tennis bracelets, and then … perhaps with a sigh…switch off the box.

And go outside to cultivate the garden. 


*


Stranieri should be up and running on both Amazon and the Belfort and Bastion site very shortly. The official launch is August 20, 2012. Lots of little things will be happening before and after that as well.

I do hope you'll read it. As I say, it is many books in one. Though, again to repeat myself, the last of them is my favorite. And there is a reason for my preference. You see, I have always been a bit of a fan of the heroic.

And there is something heroic about this new literature…this literature of re-born realism…

It requires courage to take in hand the vorpal sword and slay that Jabberwock, i.e., grandiosity and the unrealizable expectation.

Compared to which T. Rex seems mild and sympathetic.

And I'm in NM

Well, I'm officially in NM. I'll be posting here again.

Watch for all the sordid details.

my tweets

Which reminds me...

If you read my tweets because you buy or sell comics and keep track of my offerings, you should know that you'll have slim pickings over the next few weeks. I'll be on the road and what tweeting I do, if any, will be purely personal and be about my travels.

However, towards the end of July I'll pick up again. AND I hope to establish a new twitter account just to deal with my ebay business.

So, stay tuned. More to come.

I'm on the road!

Hello, hello!

I'll be on the move for a few weeks and so won't be posting here much. Not that I've had a lot of time to do so recently anyway...but my apologies and promise to do spent more time Xcargoing once I'm in NM.

Talk to you soon.

mjt

I kept copies of almost every magazine I ever worked for. They filled up boxes and boxes in the basement. Now I'm getting rid of them. I'm even selling some of them on ebay.

Oddly, I find this harder than throwing away my personal notes. These, you see, have been seen by other people. They are thus, somehow, more concrete. More real.

What is purely private is like a fantasy. It may dismissed, dissolved, murdered...and no one is the wiser. There are no witnesses to threaten retribution.

Datamation at eBay.

I haven't been ignoring you.

Discovered to my considerable distress that people had been commenting on my blog postings but, for some reason, I've haven't been seeing the aforesaid comments.

So, I haven't been ignoring you. I've just been, as is (alas) too often the case, stupid.

If want to reach me, please feel free to do so at MichaelJayTucker@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers
mjt

Ted Nugent

I have been watching the Ted Nugent affair with interest. His more or less open threats of violence against the Obama family are, indeed, distressing. Yet, on some level, I am not disturbed by the predictably inane statements of a celebrity who appears both daft and decadent. What is, however, genuinely terrifying is something else. To wit, that when he spoke, his audience applauded.

Once again, I repeat my plaintive question: how have we come to this?

moving

Spent another day packing and sorting and throwing away. We've also now got a big U-Haul container out in the driveway. Periodically, I go dump another load of stuff in it.

I've got almost all of my own personal papers and such packed up and in the U-Haul container. On one level, that's very good news indeed. On another, well, there is something disconcerting about knowing that most of one's personal and professional life can get squeezed down to a dozen 12x10x15 banker's boxes.

Sort of humbling when you think about it.

Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.

Life Everlasting...

I have friends who are inspired by the idea of not dying. I mean that literally. They hold that technological advancement will someday…someday reasonably soon… give us the power to banish death. Or, at least, to extend human life into the realm of centuries or even millennium.

I suppose that's a good thing and a worthy end. I support it. Yet, I do not think I'd care for it myself.

I mean, I've have not been particularly competent in managing the 50-something years I've already got. One shudders to think what I'd do with 500 more.

Dare not speak its name...

I have been following with interest the spate of stories about the sudden emergence of the "N-word" in connection with President Obama. A sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig: 2012" has appeared on car bumpers and on the web. A nationally read blogger posts a cartoon of the president as a chicken-eating spook. And on and on.

So, finally, it is all beginning to break, isn't it? The fog lifts. The concrete appears behind the vast abstraction. The reality: the virulence of the Right, of its hatred of Obama, has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with being a "socialist," or a liberal, nothing to do with foreign policy or the support of Israel or energy…

It is about Race. It has always been about Race. It always will be about Race.

But, then, we knew that already, didn't we?

We just didn't dare say it.

where you can find the Konas

I realized I ought to say where on Ebay my surrealistic Kona comics are. They are here.

Kona The Caveman and Me

I think I may have discovered why I'm such a strange little duck. I mean, truly bizarre. And proud of it, I might add. I've seen normality. It wasn't pretty.

But, also (and in this I'm serious) I worry a bit about the state of comic books. Or graphic novels. Or sequential art. Or call them what you will. They are, or were, the popular art and so important.

To explain…as you know, I'm moving. And, because I'm moving, I'm emptying out my house. Just about four times a week, now, I take another truckload of stuff to the dump. What I'm not throwing away, I'm donating to this or that charity. A still smaller percentage of my possessions I'm trying to sell on Ebay.

And among the things I'm trying to sell are scores and scores…hundreds!…of comic books, all that I bought or received in my misspent youth. My parents mailed them to me some years ago. I think for the amusement of watching me try to find a place to store them.

Anyway, as I go through the comics, almost all of which date from the early 1960s, I'm struck by how really weird they are.You'll recall I mentioned the series that had Mickey Mouse as a spy—a five-foot rodent who talks, somehow inserted into our world of humans, utterly out of place and yet no one seems to notice anything odd.

Well, as I've delved deeper into the piles, I've found more and more like that. More and more that's downright loopy.

For example, I've just put on Ebay three issues of "Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle," one from 1963 and two from 1964. (They are here)

Who's Kona? you ask. He is, I answer, a cave man. Specifically, Kona is a caveman who happens to look a lot like a movie star with long blond-white hair and who lives on an island that time forgot. It's the sort a spot where Neanderthals, dinosaurs, and giant apes live cheek by jowl.

Kona is the king of all this. Then, one day, a family of modern humans, the Dodds, crash their blimp on the island. That's right, a blimp. Long story as to what they were doing in a blimp and where they were going before they crashed. Suffice to say they do crash, Kona saves them, and thus begins a beautiful friendship. Kona abandons his island and he and the Dodds roam the world and have marvelous adventures.

According to Don Markstein's Toonpedia, Kona appeared when Dell publishing was in desperate need of new material when its former partner, Western Printing, set up its own line of comics, the famed Gold Key. In the process, it took with it all the titles and characters that had formerly been in Dell's stable. Kona was one of several characters to dash to Dell's rescue.

But I mention Kona because of the comics' art. It is surreal. I mean that it's surreal in the sense that the surrealists meant. The books are a succession of images…startling, alien, even hallucinogenic! It is hard to put into words just how alien they are, or how much they challenge one's normal perceptions of things.)

Thus, on Monster Isle, we have Neanderthals mounted on dinosaurs and firing rifles and Tommy guns. In the 1963 issue, Kona and friends discover the Pacificans, once humanoid but now equipped with the heads of fish or lizards—and with these strange creatures they do epic battle.

It is …it really is…a little like an acid trip. And not necessarily a good one—as demonstrated by the Pacificans, with their heads of beasts and their high-tech weapons.

And all this was my early reading matter. Is it any wonder I am myself so peculiar? The amazing thing is that I'm not even stranger than I am—maybe sprouting an animal head while riding on a dinosaur.

Okay…

Now comes the serious part. These comics date from the period when comic books were considered complete and total trash. There were no such things as well-respected "graphic novels." There were no professors using them in classes on postmodern literary theory. They were wholly without value…or so said the dominant culture.

Now, of course, all that's changed. Comics, or comix, have been legitimized. They have been integrated into haut culture. Works like Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, are quite rightly regarded as important pieces of art.

Which is all good.

And yet...

Sometimes I worry.

I am not sure you could do something like Kona, these days. Even if you could somehow scrape away the unconscious racism and sexism in the work, you might not be able to reproduce its vigor, its energy, its dream-like intensity. Those characteristics may not be valued any longer.

As I look at graphic novels (things Maus and Persepolis excepted) I'm troubled by how alike many of them are. They have a hero who faces some great challenge (Vampires, Zombies, whatever) but who spends more time wrestling with his or her own angst than with the villain. And it is angst of a very special sort—adolescent angst, or, at most, twenty-something malaise. Oh, now and then, the artist throws in Meaningful Social Issues…Feminism, gun control, Race-Class-Gender...but those are in the script as a backdrop. They are the setting before which the main character performs his or her endless soliloquy.

Which is, I think, a problem. I'm not sure how long an art form can last given so limited a repertoire. (Surely it is no surprise that comic book sales are down.)

But even if comics/comix survive, there is a deeper, more fundamental concern. I'm troubled by yet another thought.

What if the price of acceptance into haut culture is the loss of creativity?

Mickey Mouse, Secret Agent...

I'm still putting stuff on eBay. Comic books from my lost youth, chiefly. Recently, I stumbled across a set of comics that were genuinely bizarre—"Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent."

In 1966, Walt Disney and Gold Key comics decided to get into the booming spy-story market (this was when James Bond and the Man From Uncle were at their peak). And so, Mickey Mouse was promptly retooled as a kind of furry, big-eared 007.

The comics produced on this theme are almost surreal. In them, Mickey and Goofy (as the only anthropomorphic animals in a world inhabited otherwise entirely by humans) engage in 007-style adventures, complete with Bond-type villains and beautiful heroines.

I've got two that I'm offering for sale. The first is the premier issue of the series, "Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent in Assignment Time-Lock," which is dated June of 1966 and recounts Mickey and Goofy's unwilling recruitment into "PI, police international." The second is "The Mystery at Misty Gorge," in which our heroes venture into "Africa's Taboo Territory," to rescue Mara Doorna, a brilliant scientist who just happens to also be a willowy blonde. It seems she's been kidnapped by bad guys who want her to use solar power to make artificial diamonds. (No. Really. Could I make that up?)

On one level, these stories are merely bizarre. But, on another, there is something wonderfully subversive about them…an excursion into a parallel universe where the conventions and pretensions of the Spy Flick, the Comic Strip, and the Real World come together disastrously in a sort of three-way car crash of the intellect.

Which brings up an interesting question. To wit: I'm trying to market these to comic book collectors. But, I wonder if I'm not barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps I ought to be selling them to tenured professors of postmodernism and gifted directors of Absurdist Theater.

All a question of market niche, as it were.




Ebay

Liberals, Horror

So the other day I was researching some statements made by high-ranking Nazis before World War II. (Why? Long story. I am using the quotes in a play, believe it or not.)

Anyway, a couple of such remarks I ran across were particularly intriguing. In one, for instance, a statement from a speech made in the early '30s, a Party spokesman triumphantly noted that a certain other party had recently been forced out of politics entirely. National Socialism had, he noted, swept the scum's "black, red, and gold banners" out of the nation.

Who was this? Who was it that the Nazis hated so much? Whose banners were black, red and gold? Not the people you might think. He didn't mean Communists, he didn't mean some rival fascism…he didn't even mean Zionists or politically active Jews.

He meant liberals.

The Nazi's reference was to something known as the "Iron Front." Despite the rather ominous name, the Front was a union of center and mildly left of center organizations more or less allied with the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Some, like the SDP, were mild socialists. Others were surprisingly conservative. All, however, valued civil liberties, the democratic process, and (for lack of a better term) basic decency in politics. Their common flag was a Red, Gold, and Black tricolor—the traditional colors of German liberalism—and their common image was three arrows or spears in a row, one arrow in opposition to each threat to German democracy: the Nazis, the Communists, and the Traditional Right.

And the Front was the group the Nazis detested. Its leaders were arrested and sent to concentration camps even before the Communists. Even before the Jews.

And it makes sense. The Front, not the Communists, not the Stalinists, was the true antithesis of the Nazis. The Stalinists they might hate, the Communists they might try to destroy, but ultimately Radical Right and Revolutionary Left understood the other. Each admired the other. Each regarded the other as a fertile recruiting ground. (As one Nazi famously said, a good Communist could always become a good Nazi. But a Liberal? A Socialist? A Democrat? Never. That was impossible.)

And I think the Front is important to us. Not just because of its role in history, but because of what it tells us about how fanatics regard reasonable men and women. For them, compromise, negotiation, moderation, the golden mean…these things are not just distasteful. They are the Wholly Other. As terrifying as the Kraken. As alien as life from Mars.

And it explains too, I think, why the Right hates us so thoroughly today, here in America. Why it is that the Tea Party insists President Obama is a Moslem and traitor, in spite of every evidence to the contrary. Why it is that the GOP proclaims us Leninists in spite of all we do or say. Why certain churches announce that we are in league with Satan.

You see, we are terrifying to them. We are terrifying beyond measure. We are terrifying because we attempt to be otherwise. Because we attempt not to frighten.

For them, for whom only the bully and the thug are comprehendible, we are thus inexplicable, and therefore horrible.

Saddam Hussein, ebay, and me

As you know, I'm moving. As you also know, I'm either throwing away or trying to sell tons of stuff I've gathered over the last 30 years or so.

Well, if you check my ebay page today (see here), you'll find something rather amusing. Or, if not amusing, then weird as h*ll. Specifically, you'll find I'm selling a batch of English-language propaganda from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

How did that happen? Well, in 1984, I was a very young trade press journalist writing about computers. I was a bit bored and dreamed of doing something that would have "real significance." One day, while on the bus to work, I had a brain flash. I could do a book about the Iran-Iraq War, which was going on at the time. I figured it had to be important since, after all, the world was trembling at the idea of oil cutoffs from the region. And, besides, Iraq was using chemical weapons in a big way. The unspoken prohibition against them that had endured, more or less, since 1918 had vanished almost overnight.

So, I started contacting various potential sources. One of these was the Iraqi Embassy, or more precisely, the Iraqi Interests Section in Washington. (It was kind of an un-Embassy that Iraq maintained while Hussein and the Reagan White House worked out their complicated relationship.)

I called up a press officer at the Embassy and asked a few stupid questions. A few days later, I was startled to find a large package in my mailbox. It contained all of this material.

Truth be told, it was kind of creepy. Even then, everyone knew that Saddam Hussein was a major despot. I kept wondering what would happen now that my home address was in a file, somewhere, at the Iraqi Interests Section.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, nothing much did happen. I never heard from the Iraqi Embassy again. And, when I took my book proposal to various American publishers, all I got was rejection slips and a few impolite chortles.

My favorite comment came from an editor who said, in more or less these exact words, "It sounds like a good book, but no one will care about these little p*ssant countries a year from now." The scary thing was that she was probably right. Americans would only really recall the two nations after our own people started dying in the one and because of the other.

Such, alas, is human nature.

deadly passions

I was reading the news on the web the other day and came across an article about Congresswoman Giffords. The piece reported that she had asked one of her longtime associates to run for her vacant seat.

It was innocuous enough story. But, then, for reasons that I can only describe as masochistic, I scrolled down to read the commentary left by other visitors to the site There were a few remarks left by well-wishers, and then scores of vituperative attacks…on her, on her husband, on President Obama, on Democrats, on liberals and moderates in general.

I'll spare you the details of what was specifically said. Suffice that they were quite awful. The least offense of them referred to Giffords herself as "mush head." Other posts from other readers announced that of course all politicians were parasites and would be duly removed in the coming libertarian revolution. Still others repeated the Birther fantasy which, for reasons I will never understand, remains alive and kicking.

I knew, of course, that these incredible remarks were the work of a few sad, sick bastards who otherwise would be scrawling four letter words in their own excrement on the walls of public rest rooms. The only difference is that now the Web, and its anonymity, allows them to smear their feces across the globe.

I knew that. Yet, I found myself depressed. Consider the recent GOP debates with all their venom. What if this is the new norm for political discourse? What if this…the verbal abuse, the bald-faced lies, the utter lack of empathy, the demonization of others, the thinly veiled calls for violence…is the rhetoric of our age?

What then? Where do we go? In the grip of such deadly passions?

Return to New Mexico

It is a little after seven in the morning. I'm in New Mexico, now. I'm here to visit my parents, and also to open up our new apartment. It's a bit early for me to do so. We won't be out here full time until July. But, it makes some sense to have a place to stay when we (or, rather, I) visit …as I will do increasingly between now and the final move.

I'm in the apartment at the moment. It is quite nice, though a little empty. I have no furnishings except a futon bed borrowed from my father. And I'm alone, of course.

There is an oddly familiar feeling to all this. Not quite thirty years ago, I started my professional life sitting in exactly such an apartment, this one in New Hampshire. I'd gotten my first real job in the trade press at a magazine there. Martha was to join me in a few months. And so, I was alone in a set of rooms that were either starkly and chillingly empty, or utterly alive with promise and potential. Take your pick.

Today, as then, I shall of course select the latter, the promise and potential. It is far healthier to do so.


*

My son says that our moving West is a wonderful thing for us in that it will give us a fresh start. He is right. He is wise. And yet, let us confess, there is something melancholy in acknowledging that one's life's does need a fresh start, does require a new beginning…

*

The problem with such moments of reflection is that they lead to uncomfortable places. If it had not been for this crisis, would it have been possible for us (for me) to change? Or had the inertia become so great, the detritus so deep, that only the most fearsome events could force a return to motion and mobility?

In which case my mother's stroke was more than a medical emergency. It was her gift. Her sacrifice.

Let us hope that I am worthy of it.

Santorum's America

The idea that Santorum is now neck and neck with Romney is disturbing to say the least. That he might be the Republican nominee is appalling. That he might be president of the United States is horrific. The man has no more business running a nation than he does operating a nuclear reactor in his basement.

Though I do wonder. If the unthinkable should happen, and he gets the nod, what will the young libertarians of Mr. Paul think of the Santorum vision of an America governed like a giant parochial school? With condoms forbidden by law, uniforms required, and serious discussion of whether patent leather shoes really reflect up?


(news story here)

and 2000 and 2001

Tonight I finished posting Xcargo for 2000 and 2001. I think I've got most of it on the site, now.

I still have some odds and ends to add. I've left out material that's gone into various books and I have to think about whether I should add it or not. And I've got quite a bit to do in terms of adding notes, directions, and other such.

But, most of its online now. Rather a lot of work.

It's here.

vintage Xcargo 1999 -- posted

Got all of Xcargo for 1999 posted to my website.

Lord! but I wrote a lot of stuff. Kinda embarrassing.

https://sites.google.com/site/explosivecargo/home

politics and passive aggression

Years ago, I "monetized" my blog, explosive-cargo. That means that Google puts ads on it and, if those ads should ever do something interesting like earn money, I'll get a cut.

To date, I've not received a penny. But that doesn't concern me at the moment. What is amusing is the ads that show up on my blog. They appear automatically, you see, I presume in response to certain key words. (As you'd expect with a blog called "explosive-cargo," I get a lot of inserts from companies that do haz-mat stuff. Terribly disappointing for everyone, I'm sure.)

A while back I did a piece that basically compared the GOP primary challengers of 2012 to a pack of braying idiots. When I checked in on the blog a while later, I was startled to find a huge ad under my piece from some extremely right-wing organization. It more or less openly called Obama a Communist and hinted at the birther fantasy. I'm guessing that some bit of software on some server saw the names of Republican candidates in my post and assumed that I favored them.

For a moment, I was furious. I was going to contact Google and demand that the ad be removed. But, then, I had an odd thought. The right wing organization in question paid good money to make that advertisement. If it appears on my site, with my more or less left of center readers, then it will do its makers no good at all. It will be a waste of their time, their effort, and their money.

There is something satisfying in that. It is a kind of negative power. The ultimate in passive aggression…

Santorum, The Bad, The Mad, and The Passive

The fact that Rick Santorum took not one but three states in yesterday's primary is most unsettling to me (particularly as I'd just written on Monday that Romney's lead was large and comforting). I'm not at all certain how to interpret it.

Two possible explanations, both troubling, occur to me. First is that there are far more lunatics in the world (or at least in the GOP) than I'd believed possible. Second is that the average Republican voter has become so disgusted with the extended Freak Show that has been the GOP primary season so far that he/she has simply withdrawn from the affair, leaving the field to the mad and the bad.

I'm not quite sure which would be the more distressing—the number of the lunatics, or the passivity of the sane.

Clowns...

I have been watching the GOP primaries. It's been interesting to see Mitt Romney move into the lead.

As a good Democrat, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I hate to see a solid Republican candidate come to the fore. Romney will be formidable rival for Obama. He is a strong campaigner and has a lot of money behind him.

On the other, there is something reassuring in the fact that the Republicans aren't completely out to lunch. Say what you like about Mitt, at least he isn't a clown, which is not something you can say about some of his rivals.

I mean, let's face it. The Newt is just one elephant short of a circus.

10 Days, Snagglepuss, death

As I say, it seems that Reed saw the fact that Russia, the Soviet Union, was drifting toward tyranny. And it seems to have brought him much mental anguish.

Thus, he joins the list of those Who Did Not Know When To Die. If he'd perished just after his book was printed, he would have gone to his worker's paradise in perfect contentment.

And so revealed is the secret that Alexander knew but Napoleon didn't—timing. Everything depends on perceiving precisely the moment to …in the words of the immortal Snagglepuss… Exit, Stage Left.

Vintage Xcargo 1996 posted

I got all of vintage Xcargo 1996 posted to my site. It's here if you wish to see it.

multiverse, infinite Michaels, melancholy

As I say, I normally read at this time of morning. But, today, I find myself veering away from that. I'm reluctant to pick up Mr. Reed and his glorious liberation of the laboring classes…his soldiers and workers and peasants marching shoulder to shoulder under a blood-red flag.

Instead, I watch the dawn as it slowly works it way up from the east. From where I sit, I can see it. That is, I watch while the sky goes to something a little less than darkness, then pearl, and finally to light.

And I find myself thinking of very curious things. Infinity for one. Physicists now tell us we may be embedded in it. The universe itself may be only one of many… a bubble of space-time in a greater "multiverse" containing an endless number of such. Or it may be that our universe is deathless. And either way, given infinite time or infinite space or both, every possible combination of factors and features will occur again and again.

Which means that there may be an infinite number of other versions of me…some living lives exactly like my own, others living every possible configuration of life. There are, thus, Michaels who are kings and Michaels who are beggars, Michaels who painted the Mona Lisa and Michaels who discovered nuclear fission, Michaels who are great seducers and Michaels who are greatly seduced…

And about this possibility I am, and an infinite number of Michaels are, not quite certain how to respond. Do I/we feel some hollow consolation at the ersatz version of immortality it presents? Or do we all, as I suspect we do, experience the same melancholy—if only because of the certainty that we were not among the Michaels born to be rich and powerful and wise?

more on Reed

Nothing that I've said is meant to suggest that John Reed's book doesn't have value. Indeed it does. It is an important historical document in that it records the events of the Revolution in a way that few other texts do.

And it catches brilliantly one of the key aspects of civil unrest, that is to say, its enormous confusion. Armored cars rush off to God knows where. Crowds appear from nowhere, riot about something, and are gone again. Armies march…but whose? Competing governments issue contradictory pronouncements and decrees.

And all this is true to life. True to revolutions.

Thus Reed's value. He is precise in his description of imprecision.

Ten Days That Shook The World

I am writing this very early in the morning. I've gotten up, leaving Martha in bed, and gone to read in the front room. It's something I do fairly often. My current book is John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World—which, I am embarrassed to confess, I've never read before, and which (I think) I'll never read again.

It is a difficult book to read today, with all its hero worship and its enthusiasm. Reed, you see, was an American intellectual and an early visitor to Revolutionary Russia. And he was an eyewitness to the Bolshevik coup that put Lenin and his friends in power. (He'd die in the Soviet Union, eventually, and be buried in the Kremlin's Necropolis.)

But what is difficult about the book is that you know what he did not, i.e., that the great Soviet experiment would end horribly in the Gulag, in the artificial famine of Ukraine, in terror and war…with Stalin. Thus, to skim its pages is to become embarrassed for its author. Is it possible, one asks, that he could have so completely misinterpreted what he saw? That he could have been so willfully blind? Alas, of course, the answer is yes. He does not seem to notice the growing repression, the judicial murders, the suppression of other parties and other points of view…the slow drift toward first, dictatorship, and then, genuine totalitarianism.

Still, judge not lest, etc. There is evidence that Reed realized his error and, towards the end of his life, regretted the excesses of the Revolution he'd chronicled.

Second, if Reed misunderstood the nature of the Revolution around him, then he was not alone in that. Much of the world's intellectual class (if not its workers, who tend to be a hardheaded lot) bought into the Revolution, and defended it in print … occasionally in the streets…even as Stalin sent poets and filmmakers and tens of millions of others to die in Siberian winters.

Which is what disturbs me. I am, by some measures, myself an intellectual...in a small way, at least. And even if I weren't, I am a follower of greater intellectuals, a reader of their prose and a viewer of their independent productions. I listen to their wisdom and sign their petitions.

But what if…?

What if among their causes and their calls for action there are other hells? Unobserved? Awaiting birth? Midwived by those who most of all should stand guard against him?

That horned god, that hoofed fiend, that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.