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.

Editors. Pink Elephants. Enivrez-Vous.

More thoughts about editors…

Involved with any text are three individuals, who are sometimes the same and sometimes very different: a writer, a reader, and an editor.

Each of the three has an equal but different claim upon the piece in question. The writer wants to express something unique to his or her own intellect. The reader wants to hear something which impacts directly on his or her experience of the world, or lack thereof.

The editor…and again, remember, I was one…is an equal partner of the other two, but the least honest of the three. The editor believes, or pretends to believe that he or she knows what the author should be saying and what the reader should want to hear, even though they may have quite different ideas about their preferences.

In fact, of course, this is a carefully planned exercise in self-delusion. The editor has no clearer idea of what ought be written or read than anyone else. But that is in no way to suggest that the editor is valueless. Quite the reverse. Delusion is vital to creation. It adds a note of chaos to a situation that might otherwise be crippled by its own perfection.

Thus the real purpose of the editor. Not to smooth but to roughen. Not to confirm but to confuse. Not to clarify but to intoxicate. To be, in other words, the White Rabbit. The Green Fairy. The Pink Elephant.

Enivrez-Vous.

Xcargo, editors, not editors

As I've noted here before, one of my current projects is the posting to the web of all (or at least many) of my old explosive-cargo ezine columns. It is a long process. I did at least one Xcargo column a week for several years. There are a lot of columns to process -- and it isn't always easy. When I started doing the thing, my default wordprocessor was Macwrite. Not Macwrite II. Macwrite. Pretty much nothing opens Macwrite files any more and I spend a lot of time trying to jury-rig ways around my technical limitations.

That said, it's been interesting to re-read my Xcargos. I'm surprised to find that at least some of them still give me a measure of satisfaction. Not all of course. Many are quite awful. But, there are a few…maybe more than a few…that seem readable even now. Even after a decade has somehow drifted past.

I will say, though, that the columns show both the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing (and nothing, not even a blog, is as self-published as an ezine). The upside is that you are working without an editor. The downside is…that you are working without an editor.

Without an editor —and, keep in mind, for many years I was one—you are free to write pretty much what you want. There is no one to say what you can and cannot say. What should be shortened and what should be made longer. What ought not to be said and what shouldn't be allowed to go without saying.

On the other hand, there is no upper limit on your verbosity. You may drivel on for ages. And I did. The average length of a late Xcargo column was nothing less than 1000 words. That's far, far too much for almost any purpose under heaven.

Thus the unfortunate contradiction. You are more likely to write something that really should be written. But, it is all too probable that you will write far too much of it.



(and where I'm posting it: explosive-cargo)

Q1Xcargo96

I've just finished posting most of the first quarter of explosive-cargo 1996 to my website. As always, I'm amazed how much stuff there is.

This particular batch includes:

My reactions to H.L. Mencken

And Pat Buchanan's run for the white house in '96

Gerbils in certain messy places (and those who should get them)

Greater Syria and Daniel Pipes

And a good deal else besides...

cheers
mjt

the Newt -- Take 2

Ah, the Newt…the Newt…

Gingrich is back. Improbably, almost impossibly, he is back. He is now, in fact, actually within some striking distance of the GOP nomination for President.

I don't much care for him. Though, I did write about him a lot back in the early 1990s. Nothing terribly flattering, I'm afraid.

Here, in fact, is some of what I said about him in my Xcargo ezine back in 1998, when I thought he was gone for good. I was too optimistic. And, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't said some of the hard things I said about the Democrats. (I had a few readers in those days who were conservatives, you see, and I was trying to cultivate them.)

But, otherwise, I find I'm almost pleased with this little piece, particularly the part that talks about the GOP and its Faustian bargain.

The price of which, I fear, all the rest of us have had to pay…





explosive-cargo

by Michael Jay Tucker


Not the UK: No Newt?

No.

No. No.

No. No. No.

NOOOOOO!

This can't be happening! This is horrible. This is terrible. This is ... well, what I hoped for several years.

Over the weekend, just after the U.S. Republican Party -- a.k.a, the GOP -- failed to sweep Congress, and in effect reelected President Clinton for two more years ...

Newt Gingrich resigned as Speaker Of The House. He may even leave Congress.

I'm devastated.

No. Really and truly. I am. That's why I'm taking a short break from my current infamous multipart series (this on my recent trip to the UK), to write this brief Newt-note. Call it a Newt-letter. And you know what they say. No Newts is good Newts. Or something like that.

Anyway, I loved Newt. Oh, as a person of course, I thought he was probably a waste of protoplasm that would have been better spend constructing ring worms and intestinal parasites, but that wasn't the choice of the Creator, and who am I to question the ways of God? Inscrutable as they may be. In fact, down right incomprehensible. In fact, actually, might make you sort of question the sanity of the All Mighty. But we won't go into that.

But, I did love Newt. I mean, as a public figure to write about. I mean, that little square head! Looking sort of like a cinder block outhouse with a polar bear skin tossed over the top. I mean, couldn't have asked for better if you'd phoned ahead and ordered special. Comics, political cartoonists, and columnists are weeping in the aisles from one end of the country to the other. I'm thinking of organizing a support group. And a 12 step program.

And those wonderfully wretched books he'd write! And his seminars! And his taped "classes"! The ones where he'd go wandering off into some bizarre Peter-Drucker-Drivel Management Fad Buzzword New Speak Futurism where ... somehow ... in an alternative universe ... it all made sense. and, the Contract with America didn't sound like a subplot in the Godfather: Part XXXVI.

I may never smile again.

*
Actually, seriously (and this will surprise you), I think he's getting a bit of a bum deal. It really wasn't his fault that his party lost five seats in the Senate, rather than gaining the 14 he'd hoped.

No. THAT was the doing of the fanatics on the Right Wing of his party. That was the fault of the idiots who were running around making absolutely certain that Starr was on TV each and every night, with yet another grim set of hideous revelations about our Fearless Leader, Mr. Bill ("Can't Keep It In His Pants") Clinton, and thus rubbing John and Jane Q. Public's noses in the fact that yes, yes!, this WAS a Do-Nothing Congress that could see nothing outside the Belt Way.

And of course, they were talking Impeachment. Smart, that. Really brilliant. Americans are, by nature, a conservative people. And that means big sweeping changes, brought on all of a sudden without a good deal of time to argue it up, down and sideways ... well, it just makes them nervous. And, I think, with good reason.

But the Hard Right didn't listen to that. They were so busy closing in for the kill they didn't notice they were charging nose-first into a tar-pit. Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble ... you see.

*

But I think he's not getting a fair shake particularly because come right down to the nitty-gritty of it ... and say what you like about him being the spawn of the devil with 666 tattooed under that white hair of his ... but the simple fact of the matter is that if weren't for him, there would have been no GOP resurgence in the middle '90s.

'Twas he most of all, I think, who brought forty years of Democratic hegemony to an end. He realized that the Dems had held power that long only because it had the support three groups -- Organized Labor, Minorities, and Women. And it was he who saw that those three groups weren't what they used to be. Labor had been in decline since the 1960s and the de-Industrialization of the American economy. Minorities and women, meanwhile, were either themselves susceptible to a Conservative message, or else were
so involved with "Identity Politics" that they no longer spoke to each other ... much less the Liberal and Moderate White Males who could have been their allies.

And it was he who saw that you could build a revolution with the small business owners, and middle class suburbanites, and Southern regionalists, and general centrists who had found themselves before excluded from the decision-making process in Politically Correct America.

In short, he found the Republican Party a country club of the very rich, and left it a Revolutionary Rotary.

*

And, even though I'm a card carrying Democrat, on some level I can't even object to Newt's dethronement of the Dems. Forty years is a long time for anyone to run a country. Sometimes, you need a little shaking up. Even the home team can't win all the time, or you gotta start wondering who's paying off the ump.

But the thing which does worry me, and which may be the Newt's single most important accomplishment, is that while he was doing all of this ... he also was the one who signed in blood for the GOP's Faustian Bargain.

He, you see, was the one who saw that the Republicans could run the country via an alliance between the vaguely Libertarian New Right, and the finely honed theocracy of the Old.

It was he who saw that the Religious Right ... and in particular, the Christian Coalition ... could be to the GOP what Labor had been to the Democrats: the nearly fanatical political action committee that was Everywhere.

*

But, in the end, I wonder if that isn't also what brought him down. And I wonder too if it isn't an unhealthy legacy for Conservatism in this country.

For how can you be both a champion of the Individual and the servant of a Medieval concept of God ... a Moloch, who demands not merely your worship, but your annihilation? Your unconscious, uncritical, and mindless obedience?

*

But, that's neither here nor there.

The important thing is I'm crushed. No more Newt. Dear heaven. Whatever am I going to do?

Maybe he'll run for president.

Still, that's two years away. Two long years. Argh.

Oh well. Just as long as Jesse Helms doesn't go anywhere.

Onward and upward.

(c) Copyright 1998 by Michael Jay Tucker


You may see other vintage Xcargos at Explosive Cargo

UNIX quotes on twitter

Far freaking out. I was just quoted on twitter...


"UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -Michael Jay Tucker"

arrogance, life

Egotism, hubris, is among the most dangerous of the seven deadly sins. But let us not reject it entirely. Life, after all, requires more than a little arrogance. We begin with the assertion, held despite considerable evidence to the contrary, that we are worthy of existence.

the mothers in the cafe...

I am in a coffee shop (again) while I write this. A few moments back, a number of young mothers came into the cafe. It is a regular meeting place for them. I see them every morning…at least on those mornings that I am here.

They come in with their children…babies, mostly, in strollers and carriers. And, then, after having a coffee or two, they leave again. This morning, I watch them. The first mother pushes her stroller to the door. She fumbles with it. She tries to manage the carriage and her exit at the same time.

I am, of course, a southern boy. I was schooled to be a gentleman. So, even though I know what's coming, I leap to my feet and ask if I can hold the door for her and her baby.

And what I expect duly occurs. She snaps at me. Well, not exactly snaps. Her language is civil, even though her tone is not. "I can manage it myself." The stress is on the final syllable. I have, you see, insulted her by implying that she is not sufficient unto her own being. Alone, remote, distant, perfect.

Her friend, the mother with another carriage behind her, is perhaps embarrassed. She says to me, "I would have let you do it." I nod at her and return to my seat. The stream of mothers passes through the exit, each attempting to manage her child and the door at the same time, each not quite achieving that goal, each evidencing various degrees of discomfort.

They are gone.

So, let us summarize. The woman who spoke to me and refused my aid, what did she accomplish by her uncompromising assertion of self-sufficiency?

Well, she made it more difficult for her own child and her own self to leave the café. She made life slightly more uncomfortable at that moment for each of her friends—depriving them of the small but useful aid I would have given them at the door. By choosing (and it was a choice) to interpret my attempt at a civil gesture as an imposition, she made herself angry, which she did not have to be. And, as a lesser but still pertinent matter, she made me feel bad.

These were her accomplishments.

Sometimes I wonder. At what point does empowerment become self-destruction? Where does independence shade away into masochism?