Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
He made it to 84, not bad for a depressive man who had lived through the firebombing of Dresden and his mother's suicide.
Living through death, any death, is like taking a blow to the head or the guts, as you know if you've been there. Something as simple as holding my own mother's hand as she exhaled her last breath in a hospice in Arizona left me depressed, shell-shocked and angry for years. Kurt Vonnegut's mother suffered from bouts with extreme depression and mental illness, and sometimes, during the Great Depression, vented it on Vonnegut's father in plain earshot of the son: "When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," he has written. She killed herself.
As a prisoner of war of the Germans in World War II, Vonnegut was locked in a basement in Dresden and put on a work detail, making vitamins, when the Allied bombs hit. He emerged the next day with his captors, who put him to work combing the vaporized ruins, gathering up the torched, rotting corpses, of which there were many. He was a very very young person, like the 19- and 20- and 21-year-olds we have sent to stare too damn long and hard at death in Iraq. Like them, Vonnegut stared at death and the madness of war and human cruelty more deeply than many of us ever have to. I'd like to say more deeply than anyone should.
Vonnegut took the blow of his mother's suicide and withstood the pounding of cleaning up corpses in Dresden. It may not feel like it when you read books like Slaughterhouse 5, but in the end his withstanding that hit, taking that blow, and staying on his feet, communicating with us, for the next 60-plus years, is the kind of triumph of spirit that he would surely pooh-pooh. He spun his depression into a satirical, dark art that was hilarious and profoundly depressing at the same time. He did what we all want to do: he made meaning out of all this sad awful shit we're surrounded with.
He pushed ahead in his ambling, rambling way, and before he got done, he had written some of the most influential stories of the twentieth century. Kids like me read them, and our older siblings, and some of our parents -- the people in the 1960s and 1970s who saw through the curtain of deceit and technocracy to the brutality underneath. Kurt Vonnegut was the antidote to all those cruel, detached geniuses of the 20th century, Robert MacNamara, to Adolph Hitler, to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Pol Pot and the rest of the corrupt, bankrupt geniuses who could work so hard and burn so bright on the scientific and highly rationalized project of ripping flesh from bone.
Vonnegut brought those bastards low, because he made death and human frailty real to us.
When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were three artistic voices that called most loud and clear to me: Bob Dylan, Robert Altman, and Kurt Vonnegut. Their work steeped me in a brew of pathos, humor, violence, and sorrow that, it's no exaggeration to say, made me what I am today. They were the guys who were a generation older than my peers, who kind of made the map I've used. I can't say for certain if they mapped only what is really there and offered a way through the bloody mess with integrity, or if they simply chose to travel only on the roughest terrain, ignoring the easy roads. Eithher way, for me, it's been tough going following in the tracks they laid down.
Unlike the kids a scant half-generation after me, who came of age in the Reagan era's boosterism and willfull detachment from hard reality, I never could trust any leader. Never could accept a pat answer. Never could stop laughing at the self-serious, or crying at the way we waste our brief moment on the earth. Dylan, Altman, and Vonnegut, as formative material, made it hard for me to believe in having a career, a country, or a calling. I have never been good at pretending that spending lots of money on meaningless crap was a good way to live, or that something as silly as a story about God could redeem us.
The problem is, the cynicism of Kurt Vonnegut is not really of the armor-plated, diamond-hard variety one sometimes detects in the voice of a T. Coreghessan Boyle or a Frank Zappa. Vonnegut's was the jaundiced eye with the tear in it.
Altman's humor, Vonnegut's pathos, and Dylan's cruel jokey wordplay all grew from, and in turn triggered in me and my generation, a kind of laughter that tried, in vain, to hold back the tears.
With Altman and Vonnegut both leaving the planet this year, I can only feel a sense of wonder that I have made it this far myself. I recently got a wonderful job; I am raising my daughter with a joyfulness I never expected to find in myself; and I write a little to give vent to this sorrow the world inspires in me. No one save my own parents has had a more profound influence on me than these masters of the darkest terrain. But I have found, as I believe they all did, that the point of mastering the darkness is to make it through.
Kurt Vonnegut tried to take his own life at least once, with booze and pills -- in the 1980s, unsurprisingly. And rereading Slaughterhouse-5 and some of his essays earlier this year, it came clearer to me in middle age than it ever did in my youth just how dark and unyielding was his view of our futility. And yet...
And yet he came to feel like a fixture in the world, and he never died until he was old.
So it goes.
His work may not offer a lot of reasons to be cheerful. But his work, and the fact that he made it to 2007 at all, offer plenty of reasons to stick it out.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
What's a Life Worth?
It's a tired question: What's a life worth?
Well, being the good Reaganites we all are by now, we leave most questions like this to the magic of the marketplace. So what will the market bear for my bones, my body, my dead self? There are dollar figures we can put on transplants for medicine and donations for research. Let's say I'll donate all my organs (the healthy ones), suppose all my blood will be drained and used; some college pre-meds can do weird experiments on various tissues while my skeleton may hang nicely in your daughter's high school science class. Some of these exchanges must have a relatively unassailable number we can put on them.
I'm sure there's a kidney transplant for someone in me, and I've got a lotta spleen. My liver can't be in the best shape, what with my late 1970s adolescence filtered through it, and lately just the steady stream of Advils for my middle-aged aches and pains -- so many toxins over the years.... Put my liver in the debit column, then, but still: we can do the math and ballpark my net value.
Maybe unlike me, you have led a relatively clean life, ate well, light drinker, no hard drugs... Right off the bat, you've got a competitive edge, I imagine. Besides the advantage in liver recyclability, your lungs might be better, your heart more robust. You are probably worth more dead than I am. Huzzah -- there's a good chance you're worth more alive, as well.
This market will no doubt value someone lower who has lived longer and had to endure more health *issues* as we say. For instance, when my wonderful old Daddy died a week shy of his 91st birthday, my Mother and I found ourselves on the 2 extensions of her phone, at opposite ends of her house, teaming up to answer questions from the man at the Arizona Center for The Advancement of Medicine (ACTAM). This fine organization runs a program where, if you donate your body to science through them, they take care of the entire cost of transporting the deceased from his final resting place and then magically bringing the "cremains" to your doorstep in a box -- after, of course, "harvesting" the useful bits (it's a word that always jarred me, called to mind the exact wrong associations somehow, of fecund earth and bounty, ruddy farmers stooped to happy toil -- not my image of the lab in Phoenix where my Dad's cold body was rolled onto the slab from the body bag it traveled north in, from the Tucson Heart Hospital in a minivan with the ACTAM logo painted on the side.... not really harvest imagery somehow).
Anyway, there are me and my Mom, flooded with grief and bereft as it gets, and the ACTAM guy on the other end of the line is doing his pre-harvest due diligence, asking about the reliability of my Dad's organs, checklist-style.
"Heart?"
"Quadruple bypass in 1989," my Mom replies.
"Stomach?"
I jump right in: "He had -- what , Mom, half of it out in that bleeding ulcer operation when I was a kid?"
"Yeah, at least half of it," she says.
We are starting to giggle. The prostate? Long gone. The bladder? Please. When we hang up and find each other from our separate corners of the house, we're laughing with the tears running down our cheeks. Tolling it all up, given the differential between what little his remaining tissue will fetch versus the going rate for cremation -- hell, just the gas money round-trip between Tucson and Phoenix, plus the cost of that little plastic box they put his charred old bones in -- we just may have pulled the heist of the century.
Anyway, my point here is simply this: We as a people tend to listen to the market. We believe, by now, there's little if anything that can't be privatized, commodified, weighed and slapped with a price tag in an amount that someone will pay. And if we apply that cold logic to a life, then we are left with the unescapable truth that SOME LIVES ARE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS. If Sophie could have had Milton Friedman with her on the train to Auschwitz, her choice may have been easier to make.
So if the market seems like a crude way to measure the value of a human life, okay, there are other ways to judge these things -- and it's true, pegging our existence to the dollar does feel tawdry. What about the retibution factor, the value of a life weighed in a court of law? Is the playing field of justice a level one?
Well, no. Many states have the death penalty for those found guilty of killing a cop. But if you shoot a proofreader, you may get life without parole, or even find yourself back out in polite society after 15 to 20 years of hard time.
Further, if you decide to shoot someone like me on the street one evening and you happen to be relatively wealthy, there's a far better chance that you'll get off entirely or face a lesser charge than murder one. On the other hand, if you're a black man, and you were walking down the street where I was shot but you didn't shoot me, and you don't have the money for a dream team of legal eagles or anything else that rhymes, you could likely still go down for this one -- my assailant will be free, and I will remain unavenged.
The point here is also simple: as in the marketplace, so too in the halls of justice do various lives wind up being deemed worth less or more.
So what about in war? Can we find a standardized answer to our question in the maelstroms of Iraq?
As of this writing, just a few more than 3,000 American service men and women have been killed in The Bush-Cheney Memorial Sonic Barbecue in Iraq since March of 2003. Four years of a short and easy war, and 3,000 mostly very young Americans gone for good.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, a day after we honored the birthday of another American who was killed by a terrorist attack, 100 Iraqis -- a full one percent of the 1,000-day American death toll -- died in a single day of sectarian violence in Baghdad alone.
For the year 2006, according to the United Nations, 34,452 Iraqis were killed in the war's spiralling violence -- the total number of American war dead, times ten, and then throw another thousand-plus in for good measure. And that's one year of Iraqi casuallties against the full 47 months of American deaths. (Remember the UN? They're those wimpy pussies who actually had Saddam Hussein reined in pretty good before the neocons got their way.)
This represents the first time that the UN or anyone has been able to do an annual casualty count on the Iraqi side, and it's actually allowed us for the first time to find a way to standardize our currency of living breathing bodies. Don't believe it? Well, at first glance, I grant you, the disparity in raw numbers, when balanced with our own consciousness, makes you wonder if we don't consider our lives more worthy of discussion, of comprehension, or mourning -- just as a police officer's life might be more worthy of revenge than yours. Our media coverage and our bumper stickers might confirm this suspicion, might seem to indicate that one American soldier's life weighs more heavily in the cosmic balance than that of an Iraqi, when judged in column inches or special reports, when meted out in slogans and soundbites. But I want to lead you back to the cold, unbiased chalkboard to do some math with me, and try to answer this question once and for all.
There is one way to crunch these grim numbers that evens out the worth of all the lives lost, a standard like gold that all these bones and organs and all this blood can be pegged to.
Here's the formula: Add up the 2006 casualties in Bush and Cheney's war -- the 34,452 Iraqi and the 824 American deaths -- and you come up with 35,276.
Now let X stand for the dollar amount of Halliburton's total profits from the same period, calendar year 2006.
Divide X by 35,276.
We should all be worth so much.
Well, being the good Reaganites we all are by now, we leave most questions like this to the magic of the marketplace. So what will the market bear for my bones, my body, my dead self? There are dollar figures we can put on transplants for medicine and donations for research. Let's say I'll donate all my organs (the healthy ones), suppose all my blood will be drained and used; some college pre-meds can do weird experiments on various tissues while my skeleton may hang nicely in your daughter's high school science class. Some of these exchanges must have a relatively unassailable number we can put on them.
I'm sure there's a kidney transplant for someone in me, and I've got a lotta spleen. My liver can't be in the best shape, what with my late 1970s adolescence filtered through it, and lately just the steady stream of Advils for my middle-aged aches and pains -- so many toxins over the years.... Put my liver in the debit column, then, but still: we can do the math and ballpark my net value.
Maybe unlike me, you have led a relatively clean life, ate well, light drinker, no hard drugs... Right off the bat, you've got a competitive edge, I imagine. Besides the advantage in liver recyclability, your lungs might be better, your heart more robust. You are probably worth more dead than I am. Huzzah -- there's a good chance you're worth more alive, as well.
This market will no doubt value someone lower who has lived longer and had to endure more health *issues* as we say. For instance, when my wonderful old Daddy died a week shy of his 91st birthday, my Mother and I found ourselves on the 2 extensions of her phone, at opposite ends of her house, teaming up to answer questions from the man at the Arizona Center for The Advancement of Medicine (ACTAM). This fine organization runs a program where, if you donate your body to science through them, they take care of the entire cost of transporting the deceased from his final resting place and then magically bringing the "cremains" to your doorstep in a box -- after, of course, "harvesting" the useful bits (it's a word that always jarred me, called to mind the exact wrong associations somehow, of fecund earth and bounty, ruddy farmers stooped to happy toil -- not my image of the lab in Phoenix where my Dad's cold body was rolled onto the slab from the body bag it traveled north in, from the Tucson Heart Hospital in a minivan with the ACTAM logo painted on the side.... not really harvest imagery somehow).
Anyway, there are me and my Mom, flooded with grief and bereft as it gets, and the ACTAM guy on the other end of the line is doing his pre-harvest due diligence, asking about the reliability of my Dad's organs, checklist-style.
"Heart?"
"Quadruple bypass in 1989," my Mom replies.
"Stomach?"
I jump right in: "He had -- what , Mom, half of it out in that bleeding ulcer operation when I was a kid?"
"Yeah, at least half of it," she says.
We are starting to giggle. The prostate? Long gone. The bladder? Please. When we hang up and find each other from our separate corners of the house, we're laughing with the tears running down our cheeks. Tolling it all up, given the differential between what little his remaining tissue will fetch versus the going rate for cremation -- hell, just the gas money round-trip between Tucson and Phoenix, plus the cost of that little plastic box they put his charred old bones in -- we just may have pulled the heist of the century.
Anyway, my point here is simply this: We as a people tend to listen to the market. We believe, by now, there's little if anything that can't be privatized, commodified, weighed and slapped with a price tag in an amount that someone will pay. And if we apply that cold logic to a life, then we are left with the unescapable truth that SOME LIVES ARE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS. If Sophie could have had Milton Friedman with her on the train to Auschwitz, her choice may have been easier to make.
So if the market seems like a crude way to measure the value of a human life, okay, there are other ways to judge these things -- and it's true, pegging our existence to the dollar does feel tawdry. What about the retibution factor, the value of a life weighed in a court of law? Is the playing field of justice a level one?
Well, no. Many states have the death penalty for those found guilty of killing a cop. But if you shoot a proofreader, you may get life without parole, or even find yourself back out in polite society after 15 to 20 years of hard time.
Further, if you decide to shoot someone like me on the street one evening and you happen to be relatively wealthy, there's a far better chance that you'll get off entirely or face a lesser charge than murder one. On the other hand, if you're a black man, and you were walking down the street where I was shot but you didn't shoot me, and you don't have the money for a dream team of legal eagles or anything else that rhymes, you could likely still go down for this one -- my assailant will be free, and I will remain unavenged.
The point here is also simple: as in the marketplace, so too in the halls of justice do various lives wind up being deemed worth less or more.
So what about in war? Can we find a standardized answer to our question in the maelstroms of Iraq?
As of this writing, just a few more than 3,000 American service men and women have been killed in The Bush-Cheney Memorial Sonic Barbecue in Iraq since March of 2003. Four years of a short and easy war, and 3,000 mostly very young Americans gone for good.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, a day after we honored the birthday of another American who was killed by a terrorist attack, 100 Iraqis -- a full one percent of the 1,000-day American death toll -- died in a single day of sectarian violence in Baghdad alone.
For the year 2006, according to the United Nations, 34,452 Iraqis were killed in the war's spiralling violence -- the total number of American war dead, times ten, and then throw another thousand-plus in for good measure. And that's one year of Iraqi casuallties against the full 47 months of American deaths. (Remember the UN? They're those wimpy pussies who actually had Saddam Hussein reined in pretty good before the neocons got their way.)
This represents the first time that the UN or anyone has been able to do an annual casualty count on the Iraqi side, and it's actually allowed us for the first time to find a way to standardize our currency of living breathing bodies. Don't believe it? Well, at first glance, I grant you, the disparity in raw numbers, when balanced with our own consciousness, makes you wonder if we don't consider our lives more worthy of discussion, of comprehension, or mourning -- just as a police officer's life might be more worthy of revenge than yours. Our media coverage and our bumper stickers might confirm this suspicion, might seem to indicate that one American soldier's life weighs more heavily in the cosmic balance than that of an Iraqi, when judged in column inches or special reports, when meted out in slogans and soundbites. But I want to lead you back to the cold, unbiased chalkboard to do some math with me, and try to answer this question once and for all.
There is one way to crunch these grim numbers that evens out the worth of all the lives lost, a standard like gold that all these bones and organs and all this blood can be pegged to.
Here's the formula: Add up the 2006 casualties in Bush and Cheney's war -- the 34,452 Iraqi and the 824 American deaths -- and you come up with 35,276.
Now let X stand for the dollar amount of Halliburton's total profits from the same period, calendar year 2006.
Divide X by 35,276.
We should all be worth so much.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Praise Song and Requiem
Alvin was cursed and blessed three times over, a bisexual black man with an artistic temperament.
Raised in the mean South Bronx of the 1950s, Alvin was diffferent enough from the other kids in the neighborhood that he learned how to fight, and how to end a fight fast.
Alvin's personal wars weighed a ton. Maybe Vietnam didn't look so bad by comparison. He joined the Navy in the mid-60s and found himself surrounded by men. His sexuality blossomed like a tough flower stabbing up through the slats of a Navy warship. And his art blossomed alongside his sex: he photoghraphed his fellow sailors in various states of erotic thrall, nude and fragile there in the bosom of the US Navy. Bodies, naked, cold and alive during wartime. Alvin was the ship's cook, and three decades later I was fortunate enough to have him serve me the same salt cod, the same greens, the same delicious corn and potato mash that he made for the men he photographed, the men he fucked, the men he went to war with, back in the '60s.
With these men he was told to stand on deck one day, exposed, as US warplanes did a flyover and delivered a payload of chemicals down onto the unsuspecting crewmen.
Then the checkups started, weekly "visits" with the shipboard Navy doctors, who duly noted it all down in little notebooks: the changes in respiratory health, the immune functioning or debasement thereof, the white blood cells, the tumors....
Alvin and his shipmates were guinea pigs in a military medical experiment. They had been exposed to Agent Orange in advance of the Army bringing it full-on to the jungles of what had once been French Indochina. It happened a lot during Vietnam. It happens all the time, as the continuing rise of Gulf War Syndrome attests.
When I moved in to the apartment across from Alvin's in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1999, Alvin was a massive presence, the Mayor of the block and the Lord of the stoop. He was imposing, a huge, dark-skinned man who always seemed to be sporting equal parts black leather and kinte cloth, kind of a gay S&M version of a Black Panther. His ornate jewelry was masculine, yet strangely beautiful -- usually twisted hunks of amber. He would hold court for hours on the stoop into the summer nights, smoking and telling tales of his sexual adventures on the piers as he sat in a little chair, regal with his mahogany figured African walking stick by his side.
As bridge-and-tunnel weekend kids cavorted around the streets -- skinny and white and rich -- having S&M theme bachelorette parties at a tourist trap restaurant nearby, Al would spit at the curb, and suck his teeth. "These children," he'd mutter. "They don't know.... If they want to see some EQUIPMENT, they can come up to my place." He'd pause, then raise his voice indignantly. "I got equipment!"
At this point, Alvin also had cancer. Lots of it. And advanced diabetes was robbing him of his circulation. It was a fifth-story walkup, and Alvin took a long time to make it down the stairs, longer still getting up. On bad days his stoic little moans would echo softly through the tenement halls. He leaned on his African carved walking stick, and he bit his lip. If you happened upon him and he didn't have time to adjust his expression before you saw him, he looked like a sweet, scared child.
Alvin told stories, colorful tales of his life in the 1970s, bar fights and drug deals, and sexual escapades that made even libertine me blush like a Victorian granny. Stories of driving his Econoline van down to the waterfront and throwing the doors open and getting laid as the sun rose. Of runaways staying in his bed, of jealous husbands, of jealous wives.
Alvin took photographs. That was his main art form and he was dedicated to it until the end. He left behind rolls of film, some developed, some printed, some just sitting there, that taken together attest to the vibrancy and the squalor, the tenderness and the ferocity, the dreamlike wildness of New York City in the 1970s. No AIDS. No 9/11. No urban renewal. Just a scrawl of horny technicolor beauty across a broken gray landscape.
Alvin belonged to a time and a place that is disappearing. More accurately, his presence refracted back the light and the color of a whole vivid world become a mirage. It dances like a fever dream as it fades from reality. It is the pre-AIDS gay world of New York City's piers and bathhouses, bars and illicit street corner fucks at dawn. Where untamed artsists like David Wojnarowicz painted hallucinatory murals that were terrible and gorgeous, beautiful and obscene, on abandoned warehouse walls. It is the wild side that Lou Reed suggested some of us might try taking a walk on. You can tsk-tsk it away, or you can romanticize it, but somewhere between those exaggerated reactions, it simply WAS. It was real life.
And the giant space it has left, not unlike a hole in the ground, serves to remind us that everything we take for granted, that seems as natural to us as air, is really fleeting, and will die.
Alvin died in a hospital room uptown. All of us who cherished him had a big party in his honor -- we laughed at stories and wondered at the many facets of this sweet, scary, genius outlaw freak lover pussycat mountain of a man, this artist whose canvas was everywhere.
And then we all went our separate ways.
Raised in the mean South Bronx of the 1950s, Alvin was diffferent enough from the other kids in the neighborhood that he learned how to fight, and how to end a fight fast.
Alvin's personal wars weighed a ton. Maybe Vietnam didn't look so bad by comparison. He joined the Navy in the mid-60s and found himself surrounded by men. His sexuality blossomed like a tough flower stabbing up through the slats of a Navy warship. And his art blossomed alongside his sex: he photoghraphed his fellow sailors in various states of erotic thrall, nude and fragile there in the bosom of the US Navy. Bodies, naked, cold and alive during wartime. Alvin was the ship's cook, and three decades later I was fortunate enough to have him serve me the same salt cod, the same greens, the same delicious corn and potato mash that he made for the men he photographed, the men he fucked, the men he went to war with, back in the '60s.
With these men he was told to stand on deck one day, exposed, as US warplanes did a flyover and delivered a payload of chemicals down onto the unsuspecting crewmen.
Then the checkups started, weekly "visits" with the shipboard Navy doctors, who duly noted it all down in little notebooks: the changes in respiratory health, the immune functioning or debasement thereof, the white blood cells, the tumors....
Alvin and his shipmates were guinea pigs in a military medical experiment. They had been exposed to Agent Orange in advance of the Army bringing it full-on to the jungles of what had once been French Indochina. It happened a lot during Vietnam. It happens all the time, as the continuing rise of Gulf War Syndrome attests.
When I moved in to the apartment across from Alvin's in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1999, Alvin was a massive presence, the Mayor of the block and the Lord of the stoop. He was imposing, a huge, dark-skinned man who always seemed to be sporting equal parts black leather and kinte cloth, kind of a gay S&M version of a Black Panther. His ornate jewelry was masculine, yet strangely beautiful -- usually twisted hunks of amber. He would hold court for hours on the stoop into the summer nights, smoking and telling tales of his sexual adventures on the piers as he sat in a little chair, regal with his mahogany figured African walking stick by his side.
As bridge-and-tunnel weekend kids cavorted around the streets -- skinny and white and rich -- having S&M theme bachelorette parties at a tourist trap restaurant nearby, Al would spit at the curb, and suck his teeth. "These children," he'd mutter. "They don't know.... If they want to see some EQUIPMENT, they can come up to my place." He'd pause, then raise his voice indignantly. "I got equipment!"
At this point, Alvin also had cancer. Lots of it. And advanced diabetes was robbing him of his circulation. It was a fifth-story walkup, and Alvin took a long time to make it down the stairs, longer still getting up. On bad days his stoic little moans would echo softly through the tenement halls. He leaned on his African carved walking stick, and he bit his lip. If you happened upon him and he didn't have time to adjust his expression before you saw him, he looked like a sweet, scared child.
Alvin told stories, colorful tales of his life in the 1970s, bar fights and drug deals, and sexual escapades that made even libertine me blush like a Victorian granny. Stories of driving his Econoline van down to the waterfront and throwing the doors open and getting laid as the sun rose. Of runaways staying in his bed, of jealous husbands, of jealous wives.
Alvin took photographs. That was his main art form and he was dedicated to it until the end. He left behind rolls of film, some developed, some printed, some just sitting there, that taken together attest to the vibrancy and the squalor, the tenderness and the ferocity, the dreamlike wildness of New York City in the 1970s. No AIDS. No 9/11. No urban renewal. Just a scrawl of horny technicolor beauty across a broken gray landscape.
Alvin belonged to a time and a place that is disappearing. More accurately, his presence refracted back the light and the color of a whole vivid world become a mirage. It dances like a fever dream as it fades from reality. It is the pre-AIDS gay world of New York City's piers and bathhouses, bars and illicit street corner fucks at dawn. Where untamed artsists like David Wojnarowicz painted hallucinatory murals that were terrible and gorgeous, beautiful and obscene, on abandoned warehouse walls. It is the wild side that Lou Reed suggested some of us might try taking a walk on. You can tsk-tsk it away, or you can romanticize it, but somewhere between those exaggerated reactions, it simply WAS. It was real life.
And the giant space it has left, not unlike a hole in the ground, serves to remind us that everything we take for granted, that seems as natural to us as air, is really fleeting, and will die.
Alvin died in a hospital room uptown. All of us who cherished him had a big party in his honor -- we laughed at stories and wondered at the many facets of this sweet, scary, genius outlaw freak lover pussycat mountain of a man, this artist whose canvas was everywhere.
And then we all went our separate ways.
Monday, January 8, 2007
Love & Death at the age 3 and eleven twelfths
We took our daughter to see Charlotte's Web last night. (And it was a remarkably well done adaptation of the book; I wept intermittently throughout the whole thing. I seem to have completely lost my ability to ignore how sad and poignant everything in the world is, so now I outcry my wife and daughter at the movies.)
The daughter -- whose fourth birthday is a month away -- saved all her tears for afterward. This was interesting: She was happy, totally enjoying the movie etc., and then when we left the theatre she just burst into tears. We asked her if anything in the movie had upset her, and she said, no, it was Mommy hugging her -- "I have enough love!" she said, absolutely wailing. "I didn't like you hugging me! I have enough love already!" she reiterated at the top of her powerful little lungs. It was WILD.
Our theory: Charlotte's death may have caused a little displaced reaction in her. She loves to talk about death (including her cool theory that the actual bodies of people who have died are encased within the statues that commemorate them), but this was the first time she saw death rendered emotionally and with an orchestra score on the big bright screen in the dark dark room -- a rite of passage in the cinematic and emotional life of every child.
Later, feeling better on the walk home, she clarified that "I love you but I have enough love right now."
And then, once we were home and getting her ready for bed, she said with cheerful urgency: "I need some love." And threw her arms around both of us. As always, it was impossible not to comply.
The daughter -- whose fourth birthday is a month away -- saved all her tears for afterward. This was interesting: She was happy, totally enjoying the movie etc., and then when we left the theatre she just burst into tears. We asked her if anything in the movie had upset her, and she said, no, it was Mommy hugging her -- "I have enough love!" she said, absolutely wailing. "I didn't like you hugging me! I have enough love already!" she reiterated at the top of her powerful little lungs. It was WILD.
Our theory: Charlotte's death may have caused a little displaced reaction in her. She loves to talk about death (including her cool theory that the actual bodies of people who have died are encased within the statues that commemorate them), but this was the first time she saw death rendered emotionally and with an orchestra score on the big bright screen in the dark dark room -- a rite of passage in the cinematic and emotional life of every child.
Later, feeling better on the walk home, she clarified that "I love you but I have enough love right now."
And then, once we were home and getting her ready for bed, she said with cheerful urgency: "I need some love." And threw her arms around both of us. As always, it was impossible not to comply.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
A Fresh Ill Wind a' Blowin' (Part 2)
...OK, so now for the ill part.
What is so frickin' difficult about presenting a united front on the day your beleaguered, often despised political party actually gets its first whiff of power in years?
Those of us over 40 (or with any history of leftist activism in what my 4-year-old daughter calls "the old days"), well recall the sectarian hair-splitting that turned the left -- and the Democratic Party -- into a kind of academic exercise in intellectual gridlock. From the Port Huron Statement through the identity politics movements (each one of which was fractious and filled with venomous infighting over ideological correctness), and down to Ted Kennedy sucker-punching the incumbent Jimmy Carter in '76 and the Dukakis camp playing very public hardball with Jesse Jackson's people, the left has often brawled away while the Republicans kept their in-fighting behind closed doors.
It's difficult, in my opinion, to overestimate the cumulative effect that all this public fratricide has had on the citizenry's perception of the Democrats. Pundits have always attributed the electorate's historical disenchantmnent with the Democrats, and the fraying of the New Deal consensus, to the mere presence of so many "interest groups" in the party -- blacks, gays, union workers, etc. And no doubt there is some core of American voters who have been turned off by the very appearance of a party of diversity. But I believe thhat the Democrats' hubris, in electoral terms, has been their willingness to get down and dirty among themselves in full view of everyone they want to vote for them. Starting in the 1960s and stretching down through the 1992 primary, they have often seemed unable to control their bee-yatchinest instincts, smacking each other down in front of the hungry media and airing their soiled underthings for all to see and smell.
If the Democrats post-1980 could have played half as nice with each other as they did while they were falling all over themselves to kiss Republican booty, if they could have played half as rough with their opponents across the aisle as they did with their allies, then the electorate might not have turned so sour on them for so long.
Furthermore, since so many of the disputes seemed to be matters of really petty ideological or intellectual concern, they started to look like what the Republicans acccused them of being: a buffoonish caricature of Soviet-era ideological purity warriors. The party of FDR left itself open to the taunts. This red-baiting was more about the Democrats' STYLE of politics than their substance, in some ways. It played in the heartland, and it played in Dixie. It was a tarry brush, and it stuck to the Donkey's asses like sweet Southern molasses.
All of which is why a couple of news items from Day Numero Uno of the New Democratic Era feel so discouraging -- at least if, like me, you've been hoping merely that the Democrats can gain some political traction going into 2008.
One is minor and involves Charles Rangel, never a retiring type and now rapidly approaching an I-don't-give-a-shit-anymore dotage where he'll just say anything that pops in his head. Asked about his agenda for the new Congress, he replied that he would have to wait for Speaker Pelosi to get to him. "She's on a 100-hour agenda, I'm on a 2-year agenda," he said, and hinted that he thought her 100-hour pledge was a bunch of political bull. It's not a big deal, but c'mon, it's the FIRST DAY, how's about a little uniting behind the game plan here. What are you, the New York Giants?
Add this remark to Rangel's election-night gloating about kicking Dick Cheney out of some plum office in the Congressional building and returning it to the new Ways and Means Committee Chairman -- namely Rangel -- and finding Cheney some room in the basement. Look, it's funny, but let's get the party back on track electorally. The Congressman from Harlem is looking like a loose cannon, loaded with balls. It's funny and refreshing but it's also grist for the Republicans' media machine mill.
The bigger internecine bullshit wafts our way from the toxic fallout over Pelosi's smackdown of fellow Cali Democrat Rep. Jane Harman, who had lobbied hard for the House Intelligence Committee Chair, only to be rebuffed by Madame Speaker. Pelosi opted instead to give the chair to Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat and former border cop. Why bypass Harman, who was next in line? Because Harman is a moderate who equivocated on condemning the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. I say, Good for Pelosi; if the Democrats can't agree that it's both ethically right AND good politics to oppose El Presidente and his junta listening in on our phone calls and wiping their butts with the Constitution, well then there's not much to make them an opposition party. So Harman picked the wrong time to take the Liebermanesque rightward road, and it cost her. Now she's moaning and backbiting about how Congress has "lost its lustre" for her. Shut up and get behind the Mule!
All of which is to say: Make nice publically, all you donkeys, keep the fights around the proverbial kitchen table and get something done. One thing's for sure: many of us have such diminished expectations after the last 8 years thhat you all really should be able to look good rolling into 2008. Now smile for the camera.
What is so frickin' difficult about presenting a united front on the day your beleaguered, often despised political party actually gets its first whiff of power in years?
Those of us over 40 (or with any history of leftist activism in what my 4-year-old daughter calls "the old days"), well recall the sectarian hair-splitting that turned the left -- and the Democratic Party -- into a kind of academic exercise in intellectual gridlock. From the Port Huron Statement through the identity politics movements (each one of which was fractious and filled with venomous infighting over ideological correctness), and down to Ted Kennedy sucker-punching the incumbent Jimmy Carter in '76 and the Dukakis camp playing very public hardball with Jesse Jackson's people, the left has often brawled away while the Republicans kept their in-fighting behind closed doors.
It's difficult, in my opinion, to overestimate the cumulative effect that all this public fratricide has had on the citizenry's perception of the Democrats. Pundits have always attributed the electorate's historical disenchantmnent with the Democrats, and the fraying of the New Deal consensus, to the mere presence of so many "interest groups" in the party -- blacks, gays, union workers, etc. And no doubt there is some core of American voters who have been turned off by the very appearance of a party of diversity. But I believe thhat the Democrats' hubris, in electoral terms, has been their willingness to get down and dirty among themselves in full view of everyone they want to vote for them. Starting in the 1960s and stretching down through the 1992 primary, they have often seemed unable to control their bee-yatchinest instincts, smacking each other down in front of the hungry media and airing their soiled underthings for all to see and smell.
If the Democrats post-1980 could have played half as nice with each other as they did while they were falling all over themselves to kiss Republican booty, if they could have played half as rough with their opponents across the aisle as they did with their allies, then the electorate might not have turned so sour on them for so long.
Furthermore, since so many of the disputes seemed to be matters of really petty ideological or intellectual concern, they started to look like what the Republicans acccused them of being: a buffoonish caricature of Soviet-era ideological purity warriors. The party of FDR left itself open to the taunts. This red-baiting was more about the Democrats' STYLE of politics than their substance, in some ways. It played in the heartland, and it played in Dixie. It was a tarry brush, and it stuck to the Donkey's asses like sweet Southern molasses.
All of which is why a couple of news items from Day Numero Uno of the New Democratic Era feel so discouraging -- at least if, like me, you've been hoping merely that the Democrats can gain some political traction going into 2008.
One is minor and involves Charles Rangel, never a retiring type and now rapidly approaching an I-don't-give-a-shit-anymore dotage where he'll just say anything that pops in his head. Asked about his agenda for the new Congress, he replied that he would have to wait for Speaker Pelosi to get to him. "She's on a 100-hour agenda, I'm on a 2-year agenda," he said, and hinted that he thought her 100-hour pledge was a bunch of political bull. It's not a big deal, but c'mon, it's the FIRST DAY, how's about a little uniting behind the game plan here. What are you, the New York Giants?
Add this remark to Rangel's election-night gloating about kicking Dick Cheney out of some plum office in the Congressional building and returning it to the new Ways and Means Committee Chairman -- namely Rangel -- and finding Cheney some room in the basement. Look, it's funny, but let's get the party back on track electorally. The Congressman from Harlem is looking like a loose cannon, loaded with balls. It's funny and refreshing but it's also grist for the Republicans' media machine mill.
The bigger internecine bullshit wafts our way from the toxic fallout over Pelosi's smackdown of fellow Cali Democrat Rep. Jane Harman, who had lobbied hard for the House Intelligence Committee Chair, only to be rebuffed by Madame Speaker. Pelosi opted instead to give the chair to Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat and former border cop. Why bypass Harman, who was next in line? Because Harman is a moderate who equivocated on condemning the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. I say, Good for Pelosi; if the Democrats can't agree that it's both ethically right AND good politics to oppose El Presidente and his junta listening in on our phone calls and wiping their butts with the Constitution, well then there's not much to make them an opposition party. So Harman picked the wrong time to take the Liebermanesque rightward road, and it cost her. Now she's moaning and backbiting about how Congress has "lost its lustre" for her. Shut up and get behind the Mule!
All of which is to say: Make nice publically, all you donkeys, keep the fights around the proverbial kitchen table and get something done. One thing's for sure: many of us have such diminished expectations after the last 8 years thhat you all really should be able to look good rolling into 2008. Now smile for the camera.
A Fresh Ill Wind a' Blowin' (Part 1)
So today's the day a fresh ill wind blows in Washington. Or fresh AND ill. First the fresh part.
The new Congress is set to begin today, with the Democrats holding on by the skin of Tim Johnson's teeth to both houses. And there are some refreshingly decent, proactive bits of legislative business likely to come out of the House of Representatives soon -- even if it'll take longer than those famous "first 100 hours" of Nancy Pelosi.
There are six main bills that House Democrats are likely to push as they attempt not to fumble the initiative the voters handed them. From uncontroversial to mildly confrontational, they are:
1. Allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices on behalf of seniors. This will pass and Bush will sign it.
2. Lower the interest rates on federal student loans. The Dems are looking to cut the rate in half, from 6.8% to 3.4%. Another done deal like prescription drug reform, but as for the future of social spending, take ominous note that for the first time in his administration's storied career of squandering money and running up an unprecedsented budget deficit, El Presidente yesterday started "challenging" the Democrats to "work with him" to balance the budget in the next 5 years -- funny how all he did when his own party was in power was cut taxes and spend spend spend.
3. Raise the minimum wage from the level of poverty hell to the level of poverty purgatory ($7.25 an hour is the target, try living on that my friend). This also will wind up with so many loopholes attached for so many typres of businesses that it's pretty much political window dressing. Cue the crocodile tears: "Sops for the poor! Sops for the poor!"
4. Approve the 9/11 Commission's recommendations on homeland security. This is the kind of political cudgel the Donkeys can use to make the Elephants look unpatriotic and incompetent. That's mainly because the 9/11 Commission somehow escaped critical scrutiny and almost instantly came to be seen as some sort of above-the-political-fray panel of Olympians issuing high-minded, omniscient edicts like thunderbolts. (It's funny how in a democracy, it's always the unelected who are perceived as best representing the interests of the people -- but that's an inversion best left for another post). Everyone will be shamed into passing this and Bush will look like even more of a dick than he already does if he resists it -- but be on the lookout for President A-Hole to attach another of his famous "Signing Statements," which basically boil down to him saying "I signed this because I had no choice politically but I reserve the right to construe from the words herein the exact opposite meaning."
5. Allow research on stem cells. The Martyr Bush, true to his intellectually blighted love affair with Jeebus, will certainly veto this, and in a bracing return to modernity, Congress will likely override his Crusade. Welcome back to the 21st century, y'all.
6. Tax oil company profits and use the revenues to fund research and development of alternative energy sources. Unsurprisingly, this most vital and intelligent policy initiative will be the hardest to push through. Every oily politician on Capitol Hill will be sneaking through the backdoor to attach riders, formulate loopholes, and generally hang the process. Whatever Frankensteinian form the bill ultimately takes, there's still little chance President Halliburton will sign it.
If all but item 6 seem pandery and mild, the entire package of initiatives still feels refreshing -- if only by comparison to the draconian wasteland of legislative cynicism that has stretched Sahara-like across the past 6 years.
But thhere's still plenty of noxious nastiness in the air, too....
The new Congress is set to begin today, with the Democrats holding on by the skin of Tim Johnson's teeth to both houses. And there are some refreshingly decent, proactive bits of legislative business likely to come out of the House of Representatives soon -- even if it'll take longer than those famous "first 100 hours" of Nancy Pelosi.
There are six main bills that House Democrats are likely to push as they attempt not to fumble the initiative the voters handed them. From uncontroversial to mildly confrontational, they are:
1. Allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices on behalf of seniors. This will pass and Bush will sign it.
2. Lower the interest rates on federal student loans. The Dems are looking to cut the rate in half, from 6.8% to 3.4%. Another done deal like prescription drug reform, but as for the future of social spending, take ominous note that for the first time in his administration's storied career of squandering money and running up an unprecedsented budget deficit, El Presidente yesterday started "challenging" the Democrats to "work with him" to balance the budget in the next 5 years -- funny how all he did when his own party was in power was cut taxes and spend spend spend.
3. Raise the minimum wage from the level of poverty hell to the level of poverty purgatory ($7.25 an hour is the target, try living on that my friend). This also will wind up with so many loopholes attached for so many typres of businesses that it's pretty much political window dressing. Cue the crocodile tears: "Sops for the poor! Sops for the poor!"
4. Approve the 9/11 Commission's recommendations on homeland security. This is the kind of political cudgel the Donkeys can use to make the Elephants look unpatriotic and incompetent. That's mainly because the 9/11 Commission somehow escaped critical scrutiny and almost instantly came to be seen as some sort of above-the-political-fray panel of Olympians issuing high-minded, omniscient edicts like thunderbolts. (It's funny how in a democracy, it's always the unelected who are perceived as best representing the interests of the people -- but that's an inversion best left for another post). Everyone will be shamed into passing this and Bush will look like even more of a dick than he already does if he resists it -- but be on the lookout for President A-Hole to attach another of his famous "Signing Statements," which basically boil down to him saying "I signed this because I had no choice politically but I reserve the right to construe from the words herein the exact opposite meaning."
5. Allow research on stem cells. The Martyr Bush, true to his intellectually blighted love affair with Jeebus, will certainly veto this, and in a bracing return to modernity, Congress will likely override his Crusade. Welcome back to the 21st century, y'all.
6. Tax oil company profits and use the revenues to fund research and development of alternative energy sources. Unsurprisingly, this most vital and intelligent policy initiative will be the hardest to push through. Every oily politician on Capitol Hill will be sneaking through the backdoor to attach riders, formulate loopholes, and generally hang the process. Whatever Frankensteinian form the bill ultimately takes, there's still little chance President Halliburton will sign it.
If all but item 6 seem pandery and mild, the entire package of initiatives still feels refreshing -- if only by comparison to the draconian wasteland of legislative cynicism that has stretched Sahara-like across the past 6 years.
But thhere's still plenty of noxious nastiness in the air, too....
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Death American Style, Part 1: The President and the Godfather
Laying in state is weird. Is it just me?
I've been riveted by the twinned images of the President and the Godfather, the multitudes turned out to see these men off -- ex-President Ford in a coffin that looks like the highest-end industrial-style Yuppie fridge, itself then draped in the flag; and the Godfather of Soul James Brown, resplendent in his open casket, wearing what he might have worn for another brilliant, powerhouse gig New Year's Eve at B.B. King's Blues Club in New York City, had he lived another few days.
James Brown had way more cool titles than Gerald Ford. Ford was Senator Ford, and then Vice President Ford, and finally, Zelig-like, President Ford. James Brown, on the other hand, was the Hardest Working Man In Show Business, and also Soul Brother Number One. He was the Black President, and in the end he reigned as the Godfather of Soul -- and he reigneth forever.
Ford was the kind of decent, conservative statesman and only mildly unethical rich man that we now have a name for - we call such people Democrats. He was a modest man who almost literally stumbled into the most powerful office in the world when Spiro Agnew had the lack of grace to take a petty bribe from a minor camapign contributor (apparently unaware of the truest truism in politics, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"). In came Ford from the Senate, a loyal and competent sort, and soon out went Nixon and, well, you know the rest.
Then there was James Brown, who apparently could be a real dick but was certainly the type to leave his mark on the world. A rigid taskmaster who fined his musicians for too many notes, too few notes, or missed dance steps; a man capable of hitting his wife on occasion; a musical and terpsichorean innovator with one good foot planted in Africa and the other right here in the African American ghetto; in short, a man with real drive, pulling himself out of the kind of Georgia childhood that swallowed multitudes of Black Americans in the first few decades of the 20th century, but which by God would not take him without a motherfuckin' fight.
Ford had much of what usually is considered glory handed to him by fate, by coincidence, by Dick Nixon. James BRown clawed and scratched for every dime he spent or saved, and every ounce of glory he ever tasted. The President-select and the Godfather by acclamation.
It is typical of poor old Gerald Ford's lot in life that his death, too, should be so thoroughly upstaged. But then, that befits Ford's willingness to laugh at himself and allow himself to be somewhat overshadowed: he was the junior partner in his marriage, as it's safe to say that the Betty Ford Clinics have made a more lasting contribution to American culture than anything Ford accomplished as President. He will probably go down, in fact, as only the THIRD-most historically important member of HIS OWN ADMINISTRATION, what with Rummy and Dark Lord Cheney getting their first intoxicating whiffs of the Oval Office, testing the outer limits of the evils of statecraft under Ford's tenure. Now even as a dying American President, Gerald Ford is Number Two (Three, actually if you count Saddam Hussein's death the same week). It's appropriate that Ford looked sort of like Charlie Brown all grown up. Good Grief!
So there's President Ford's coffin, in the stentorian chilliness of the Capitol Rotunda, draped in the flag. Mourners file by, some lay a hand on the flag while others shed a tear. Memories echo in the air, unseen. And there's Soul Brother Brown, sprawled out for all to see at the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Harlem, where he recorded one of the greatest live albums of all time and where he made men dance and women swoon. Lines stretch out into the cold Harlem night. This last gig may be the Godfather's best performance yet.
I've been riveted by the twinned images of the President and the Godfather, the multitudes turned out to see these men off -- ex-President Ford in a coffin that looks like the highest-end industrial-style Yuppie fridge, itself then draped in the flag; and the Godfather of Soul James Brown, resplendent in his open casket, wearing what he might have worn for another brilliant, powerhouse gig New Year's Eve at B.B. King's Blues Club in New York City, had he lived another few days.
James Brown had way more cool titles than Gerald Ford. Ford was Senator Ford, and then Vice President Ford, and finally, Zelig-like, President Ford. James Brown, on the other hand, was the Hardest Working Man In Show Business, and also Soul Brother Number One. He was the Black President, and in the end he reigned as the Godfather of Soul -- and he reigneth forever.
Ford was the kind of decent, conservative statesman and only mildly unethical rich man that we now have a name for - we call such people Democrats. He was a modest man who almost literally stumbled into the most powerful office in the world when Spiro Agnew had the lack of grace to take a petty bribe from a minor camapign contributor (apparently unaware of the truest truism in politics, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"). In came Ford from the Senate, a loyal and competent sort, and soon out went Nixon and, well, you know the rest.
Then there was James Brown, who apparently could be a real dick but was certainly the type to leave his mark on the world. A rigid taskmaster who fined his musicians for too many notes, too few notes, or missed dance steps; a man capable of hitting his wife on occasion; a musical and terpsichorean innovator with one good foot planted in Africa and the other right here in the African American ghetto; in short, a man with real drive, pulling himself out of the kind of Georgia childhood that swallowed multitudes of Black Americans in the first few decades of the 20th century, but which by God would not take him without a motherfuckin' fight.
Ford had much of what usually is considered glory handed to him by fate, by coincidence, by Dick Nixon. James BRown clawed and scratched for every dime he spent or saved, and every ounce of glory he ever tasted. The President-select and the Godfather by acclamation.
It is typical of poor old Gerald Ford's lot in life that his death, too, should be so thoroughly upstaged. But then, that befits Ford's willingness to laugh at himself and allow himself to be somewhat overshadowed: he was the junior partner in his marriage, as it's safe to say that the Betty Ford Clinics have made a more lasting contribution to American culture than anything Ford accomplished as President. He will probably go down, in fact, as only the THIRD-most historically important member of HIS OWN ADMINISTRATION, what with Rummy and Dark Lord Cheney getting their first intoxicating whiffs of the Oval Office, testing the outer limits of the evils of statecraft under Ford's tenure. Now even as a dying American President, Gerald Ford is Number Two (Three, actually if you count Saddam Hussein's death the same week). It's appropriate that Ford looked sort of like Charlie Brown all grown up. Good Grief!
So there's President Ford's coffin, in the stentorian chilliness of the Capitol Rotunda, draped in the flag. Mourners file by, some lay a hand on the flag while others shed a tear. Memories echo in the air, unseen. And there's Soul Brother Brown, sprawled out for all to see at the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Harlem, where he recorded one of the greatest live albums of all time and where he made men dance and women swoon. Lines stretch out into the cold Harlem night. This last gig may be the Godfather's best performance yet.
Monday, January 1, 2007
Happy New Year 1400 AD.
"They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town..."
-Bob Dylan
There's video clips all over the Internet of a gnarled old man with a shaggy beard and a noose around his neck. Pixellated images. Occasional belches of video noise and digital artifacting tell us that this was someone's cell phone, probably, pointed above the crowd in an arc. Held aloft by a shaky hand. Everything about the form is soothingly postmodern -- after all, postmodernity is where we live. Hell, this distorted footage could have been taken at the Super Bowl. A hip hop show. A comedy club on the Sunset Strip. Paris Hilton's limo.
Yeah, the form. Familiar as a porno by now, easy on the soul. The content? That's something else.
All events are not equal, even if the way we consume them is shockingly the same. We eat this stuff up, on YouTube, via e-mail, all over the Net. We get it downloaded straight onto our cell phones through V Cast. We stare over a co-worker's shoulder at TMZ in a cubicle at work. Content.
There's lost footage from Dave Chappelle's show. There's Britney getting out of a long black limousine with no panties on. There's the beheading of some Western journalist with a kitchen knife by some men in black hoods with Arabic writing all over the wall as they hack and saw relentlessly at this skinny white neck, blood spurting everywhere. There's clips of Japanese baseball pitchers throwing 98 MPH. There's a once beloved comedian having a psychotic racist meltdown. There's some awesome band from MySpace.
There's Saddam on the gallows.
I'm not here to shed a tear for Saddam Hussein. Just maybe a couple for the rest of us. All it cost us to see this brutal asshole of a dictator die in terror was 3,000 American lives and counting; at least 10 times that many Iraqi lives and counting; a few decades' worth of international diplomacy and institution-building; and not a small chunk of what we once called our souls.
This holiday week, while Christians celebrated the anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Peace, I walked my very sentient, precocious 4-year-old daughter past the newsstands of Brooklyn and tried to keep her distracted with stories about Santa Claus, as the front page of every major daily offered grainy blown up, blown out images of a fucked up old bearded man about to swing by a rope around his neck. Someone in Baghdad has a really nice cell phone. Someone who can't get potable water or more than a few hours of electricity a day, and for whom a trip down the street is a life-threatening gambit, held that cell phone high over his head in the square and pointed it right at the gallows. A tiny chip inside this little hand-held machine set to work, processing signals with unbelievable precision and speed, and captured a series of brief moving pictures of a public execution.
See how we are. See how far we've come. We have all the technology of the 21st century, combined stunningly with all the savagery and barbarism of the dawn of the 15th. Gawk at that -- hell, take a picture, it'll last 14 minutes longer.
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town..."
-Bob Dylan
There's video clips all over the Internet of a gnarled old man with a shaggy beard and a noose around his neck. Pixellated images. Occasional belches of video noise and digital artifacting tell us that this was someone's cell phone, probably, pointed above the crowd in an arc. Held aloft by a shaky hand. Everything about the form is soothingly postmodern -- after all, postmodernity is where we live. Hell, this distorted footage could have been taken at the Super Bowl. A hip hop show. A comedy club on the Sunset Strip. Paris Hilton's limo.
Yeah, the form. Familiar as a porno by now, easy on the soul. The content? That's something else.
All events are not equal, even if the way we consume them is shockingly the same. We eat this stuff up, on YouTube, via e-mail, all over the Net. We get it downloaded straight onto our cell phones through V Cast. We stare over a co-worker's shoulder at TMZ in a cubicle at work. Content.
There's lost footage from Dave Chappelle's show. There's Britney getting out of a long black limousine with no panties on. There's the beheading of some Western journalist with a kitchen knife by some men in black hoods with Arabic writing all over the wall as they hack and saw relentlessly at this skinny white neck, blood spurting everywhere. There's clips of Japanese baseball pitchers throwing 98 MPH. There's a once beloved comedian having a psychotic racist meltdown. There's some awesome band from MySpace.
There's Saddam on the gallows.
I'm not here to shed a tear for Saddam Hussein. Just maybe a couple for the rest of us. All it cost us to see this brutal asshole of a dictator die in terror was 3,000 American lives and counting; at least 10 times that many Iraqi lives and counting; a few decades' worth of international diplomacy and institution-building; and not a small chunk of what we once called our souls.
This holiday week, while Christians celebrated the anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Peace, I walked my very sentient, precocious 4-year-old daughter past the newsstands of Brooklyn and tried to keep her distracted with stories about Santa Claus, as the front page of every major daily offered grainy blown up, blown out images of a fucked up old bearded man about to swing by a rope around his neck. Someone in Baghdad has a really nice cell phone. Someone who can't get potable water or more than a few hours of electricity a day, and for whom a trip down the street is a life-threatening gambit, held that cell phone high over his head in the square and pointed it right at the gallows. A tiny chip inside this little hand-held machine set to work, processing signals with unbelievable precision and speed, and captured a series of brief moving pictures of a public execution.
See how we are. See how far we've come. We have all the technology of the 21st century, combined stunningly with all the savagery and barbarism of the dawn of the 15th. Gawk at that -- hell, take a picture, it'll last 14 minutes longer.
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