Incorporeal Works

I am boldly going beyond where sane man has ever gone before.

After previously ignoring as much as possible the river of commentary spewing from every media source over the Presidential primaries, especially regarding the slow-mo train wreck of the Democratic edition, I have spent way too much time since early this morning watching coverage of the Hillary-Obama grudge match, West Virginia round.

I have seen apparently fine minds of my generation destroyed by involuted political analysis, shouting hysterically in the electronic streets of MSNBC and CNN, joined by all the phantom deities in the aether of incorporeal information. I hope never again to hear the shrill ravings of Terry McAuliffe, the clangorous carping of Chris Matthews, the torturous rationalizations of Howard Wolfson, nor see ever again the fixed, zealous grins of Obama supporters chanting their magic mantra of “change.”

What rough chimera, its hour mercilessly prolonged, slouches towards Denver to be wrung from the guts of this primary season?

I heard a Clinton spokeshead ranting that regardless of any numerical advantage in elected delegates Obama has in hand at Denver, the SuperDelegates must do the right thing and give the party nod to Hillary. Why, then, have months and months of campaigning? Screw the democratic process, bring back the smoke-filled rooms (minus any under-21 tender lungs) and tell the Democratic faithful what is good for them.

Somewhere John McCain is laughing.

I am pouring myself another drink, and ripping the batteries from my remote.

In 1952 or 1953, my family received an RCA television, radio, record player combination in a tasteful wooden cabinet. What would have been called later a Home Entertainment Center. TV became a fixture in our lives. For the first few years before local stations started up, we squinted at snowy signals from Atlanta, of a quality which would not be acceptable nowadays. Would that the quality of programming had kept pace with technological advances so rapidly occurring over the past fifty years.

With cable, you now can purchase access to almost a hundred channels, paying $50+ for the privilege of seeing attenuated television, almost all with commercials, in spite of the fact you are paying for the access, more than we did back when the flecked and fragmentary signals from Atlanta gave us three channels on a good day.

I now pay nine dollars, I think, for “limited cable,” which brings me a dozen channels, mostly those available over the air waves. I only do that much because I get ten dollars off my cable internet connection because of subscribing to even so stripped-down a television service.

And do you know, I turn off television minutes into most programs because the commercials are so numerous, strident and infuriating that I cannot endure them more than fifteen minutes or so for the sake of 90 per cent. of the programming.

I just turned off the late local news because of a local furniture commercial featuring a screaming announcer. Television is not worth the price we pay in enduring the commercials. Public televison is going the same way, slowly, many of the high-ticket PBS shows run commercials identical to the “free” broadcast versions.

Next year, analog television will be no more. Those who do not have cable will have to purchase (with a government subsidy) a converter box to get their daily quota of commercials. Pfui. If Comcast ditches the “limited cable” now provided to me, I am off the television wire, as I have been off the phone company wire for two years past.

Sometimes technological advances just magnify the tawdriness of the products sold.

The dust is settling over yesterday’s primary results in Indiana and North Carolina. Obama wins by a substantial margin in NC, Clinton by a narrow margin in Indiana. A few heavyweights in the media are saying the race is over and pressure will build on Clinton to concede and support Obama. Perhaps. There were earlier pronouncements along the same line, after Iowa and after Obama’s eleven or twelve straight victories. Like a typical National Weather Service forecast, adjustments to fit reality had to be made.

If this is indeed the sounding of the first few notes of the Fat Lady’s song, what happens next? I would expect to see Hillary Clinton congratulating Obama on his victory and pledging to support him vigorously for the race in the fall. I do not think she will accept a nod for Vice-President. There is another Presidential  election in 2012, and if Obama loses with her on the ticket, no hope for Hillary in 2012. Should Obama lose with someone else, Senator Clinton is in position to be the front runner again. So saith I. If the masses of journalists and broadcasters can boldly predict at every turn, why can’t I?

The game is afoot.

Can a woman who stood by her man through appalling evidence of his moral corruption expect the reward of her party’s nomination for President?

Can a man whose father is Moslem and whose middle name is the same as a late dictator of Iraq convince enough voters that these are trivial issues to win his party’s nomination for President?

Can the same man, having repudiated an old mentor who went media-crazy and spouted hate speech, emerge cleansed and viable for the nomination?

Will enough voters in the Democratic primaries still to come decide that $30-$40 apiece in lower gas taxes is an important enough issue to help secure the nomination for Hillary Clinton?

That the last issue is the most substantive issue engaging the combatants is depressing to me.

Oh, and McCain the Republican nominee is for sprinkling the $30-$40 amongst the grateful populace. A Democratic and a Republican contender agree on something.

Sail on, O ship of state.

From the inception of BitterGate (will WaterGate never die?) I wondered what Obama had said that was so shocking after the past forty years of Republican electoral strategy. Starting with the opportunistic recruitment of disaffected white Southern Democrats following the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, Republicans have come to own the Angry White Male vote, as some pundit described this extended voting bloc. Adding to the unhappy segregationists the unhappy evangelical Christians and the bitter homophobic vote, Republicans have forged alliances which have kept them in the White House for 28 of those past forty years. Not to mention winning both houses of Congress in 1994, holding on to them until Jim Jeffords cracked the door of the Senate in 2001.

I doubt that the AWM vote was likely to go Obama’s way in any event, but in the view of legions of talking heads, Democrats are outraged by this evidence of his “elitism.” Pfui. Democrats supporting Clinton are huffing and puffing, but if Obama gets back on the course he early set, of talking about real issues, with his former eloquence, he will likely get the nomination and perhaps the Presidency. There, I have committed Fearless Political Forecasting, a jinxed undertaking this year.

Tomorrow Indiana and North Carolina have their primaries. Stay tuned.

In this morning’s Chattanooga Times Free Press there was a column by a syndicated political commentator, Bob Hebert, reviewing the shambles of the Democratic Party nomination process and points out, as others have repeatedly, that the Democrats are in danger of destroying the best chance in years to take the Presidency with an undamaged candidate. Herbert makes many good points, both about the savagery of the Clinton war on Obama and about this fresh face and voice who seems to have lost his message in the swamps of a virtual Swift Boating by another Democrat.

As I write this, Pennsylvania polls are closing. We shall see if Obama will emerge strongly enough to finally convince the party powers that he must be the candidate, or if the election for the Democrats will be compromised fatally by continued internecine warfare.

God help us.

Today my father would have been 88 years old. He died September 13, 2000. Didn’t quite make it into the 21st century. Gone not quite eight years. Eight years at my age seems a flash of time, an eyeblink. When I was a child, such a span of time contained enormous changes in me and in my world. My first memories fixable in time concern the imminent birth of my sister, when I was just turned three. Eight years from that date encompassed for me nursery school, kindergarten, another sister being born-prematurely, I remember clearly seeing the pink ribbons taped by the neonatal nurses to her hairless head in the hospital-and almost all of grammar school. Within that familiar school-based calendar of a child, many events crowded; my brush with polio, my grandparents maternal moving from one post to another, where we visited our Colonel and his Lady each summer, birthdays, report cards, hot summers, snowy winters. My life, looked back on at the lofty age of eleven, eight years from my first sister’s birth, the same span of time that seems so trivial from my sixty-fifth year now in progress, was a great stretch of eventful time.

And since my father died, my youngest son married, he and his bride bought a house, they conceived and brought forth one, then a second grandchild, I abruptly departed my job of seventeen years and dwelt in the lotus-eaters land of retirement for five of those eight years. It seems so short a time compared to the years of my childhood, despite all the events thickly clustered. Time is so much shorter when you are old; for a child, Christmas seems an eternity in coming each year, while for a person as full of years as myself, the dates whip by like telephone poles on an interstate highway, when you are driving at ten miles over the speed limit.

Time, like supply and demand in the “dismal science” of economics, is always elastic, and the relativity of age sets the parameters for that elasticity. Now my years accelerate, and options shrink with the realization of an indeterminately shorter road ahead of me than behind. Carpe Diem is paradoxically better suited to the young, who have the energy to act upon that dictum; at my age I sputter and halt my way towards each fresh pleasure.

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this city, or travel in the country, to see idle and poorly-dressed people, often with children equally furnished, shuffling into and out of homeless shelters and welfare offices and public medical clinics, purchasing their food with government-issued debit cards; is this the sign of neglect on the part of society in general? Should we provide for such people as a duty? Many would say so.

But my intention is very far from being confined to examine only the homeless and their offspring; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of those who have failed in the great competition for a proper livelihood, a failure which is excused many on the left as worthy more of pity than opprobrium. Were the economy of this country not in its present robust condition (the whining cavils of certain weak sisters notwithstanding), perhaps such a construction on the facts would be supportable.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and pondered on the true state of affairs, I must demur from my softer compatriots, and counsel a return to that vigorous and proper view of life that rightly blames human suffering on those who suffer, who rudely exhibit to the self-reliant these disturbing signs of poverty.

If those who have taken too little care to provide for themselves be always assisted out of the public purse, what motive will they ever have for assisting themselves, rather than taking from the more provident those blessings earned entirely by their own efforts? The rewards of full bellies, decent clothing and all the necessities of existence should fall only to those who have won in the just and worthy pursuit of wealth.

For those feckless wretches who affront decent sensibilities with odorous and ragged spectacles in public places, let them learn prudence, economy and self-reliance without the assistance of those who have that comfort and security earned solely by their unaided efforts.

Continue reading ‘Modest Reflections on Poverty’ »

In the summer of 2004, a blog began appearing online maintained by a soldier in Iraq. There were plenty of these “Milblogs” as they were called, but Colby Buzzell’s blog, My War (originally Fear and Loathing in Iraq), was exceptionally vivid and gave a sense of what a grunt’s life in Iraq was like. Buzzell’s writing was noticed and eventually he turned his blog into a book once he was out of the military and back home. Now he writes pieces for Esquire and occasionally other magazines.

In December of this past year, he did a piece for Esquire on an “Urban Explorer,” Miru Kim, who takes photographs of nudes (mostly herself) in the back spaces of New York City and other places. Kim favors abandoned buildings, tunnels, odd examples of outworn architecture. Rather like going on an urban safari, complete with spooky dark places, and encounters with strange people dwelling in the low and abandoned spaces of urban landscapes. The soft lines and textures of the nudes contrast with the sharp, pocked and shadowy cityscapes used as backdrops.

I had encountered the term “urban explorer” several years ago on a Live Journal page maintained by Cherie Priest, an author of horror and supernatural fiction, former Chattanoogan now living in Seattle. Priest went around the aging industrial areas of Chattanooga snapping photographs and posting them on her Flickr account. She does not do nudes for her photographs, however. Priest now displays her work on her blog page. Interesting stuff. I like her books, as well.

I also like the intersection of so many interests new and old I find whilst surfing the internet. From a former blogger to a magazine writer, to an artist in urban photographs, to an author of books in a genre I rarely read. Makes for late nights and poor posture, but a shot or two of Bushmill’s helps with those minor problems.

Sitting in a bar tonight, as the daylight savings sunset lingered, compared to last week, I practiced my favorite occupation when bar visits yield no conversation. I watched people. One apparent family of three, middle-aged father and mother with their twenty-something daughter, especially caught my eye.

I was looking out the wide front window of the bar as the family got out of their SUV across the street, father on one side of the vehicle, wife and daughter on the other side. They preserved their separation as they crossed the street, the father with inward, serious self-absorption, the two women both with downcast eyes, arms tightly crossed beneath their breasts. The shadows were lengthening as they approached the sidewalk in front of the bar. Still separated by the gap between driver and passengers, as they neared the bar the father was cropped out of the frame of the bar window. The two women turned towards the door, then the man followed into the frame, and reached to hold the door for his family.

They entered the bar, and sat at a window table on high stools, the father and mother on one side, the daughter on the other. They were handsome people, all of them, lean, well-groomed and dressed in LL Bean casual clothes. The father had mildly long hair, mostly silver, swept back across his ears. The two women had highlighted medium blond hair, pulled back and gathered at the napes of their necks.

They gave their orders to their server, and exchanged desultory conversation, still a bit apart from one another. The late daylight savings sun streamed across their finely boned faces, weathered in the case of the older couple, still softly contoured for the young woman.

Something about the crisp, cold light from a low winter angle reminded me of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Regardless of the season, Wyeth’s paintings always make me think of winter. Something about the light, and the subdued colors combined with sharp contrasts in light and shadow.

I wondered about their lives, about their reason for going together to a bar which largely attracts young people, singles and couples. I wondered about their reticence with each other. I came up with no answers, any more than I do looking at a Wyeth painting; there are only questions.