Who is the Puppet Master?

If you follow the link in the title of this post, you will be presented with an entry from the TomDispatch archives. In this post, David Swanson makes the argument that Obama's first term in office looks a lot like what could have been Bush's third term. David shows a great talent for looking beyond simple political memes. I believe, however, that he should have taken one more step back to see the bigger picture.

Through many presidential terms, at least since Reagan, the United States' policies and actions abroad have been fairly static. Social reforms like improved healthcare have been proposed and then shot down for decades. Life for all of us who are not wealthy has been on a steady decline.

The public has vacillated in their support for a particular political party for many years. We've had a steady rotation between the two majors -- Republican and Democrat -- which was the result of a cyclic emotional ride of the public between beguilement and disgust. Unfortunately, the public's opinion of Obama has already achieved stunning lows in only his first year in office.

So here we have the citizenry, continually unimpressed and at times ashamed of our very own government. Nothing seems to get better. The more we want things to change, the more they seem to stay the same. We elect, we hope, we cry, and we re-elect. Nothing the public can do to rearrange the layout of the party landscape in Washington does any good.

All of our representatives in that governmental center don't actually represent us. They have got to be a Potemkin dancing troupe, a cadre of entertainers that read from the same script, an army of puppets that dance to the whims of a different master.

So I ask: who is the puppet master?

One of Those Days

OMFG, it's one of those days.

I have Those Days once in a while and I never like it. Everything is wrong; I can't walk without knocking something over or hold something without spilling it.

I have no idea why I sometimes have one of Those Days.

Everything seemed just fine in the morning. I didn't spill anything. I was able to walk without tripping over invisible wires. I felt calm. It was a sunny morning, right after one of the bad thunderstorms raged through the area the night before.

Now, nearly 10:00 pm, I'm filled with a sourceless rage. It has been building all day long. For some reason, things that went wrong today really pissed me off. I don't see red, but I sure want to smash something with a large bat.

I'd like to begin with my computer.

My job requires eight hours of computer time. If I'm "lucky", I get to go to a meeting for an hour or so. But, these meetings usually end up with a list of items that I need to resolve, usually by pecking away at the keyboard and staring at the monitor for a couple hours or more.

So, when I come home, I have very little desire to sit at this machine and do anything with it. I despise the way that corporate greed runs our lives. I live in America, the land of the free (as long as you can pay for it), but the standard corporate office culture looks more like slavery, the longer you study it.

I naturally want to get away from the trappings of my office life when I'm home. Unfortunately, this computer is the only affordable means I have for expressing what little creativity I have lurking within.

Thus, I take mouse or pen in hand and put on my 21st-century fumbling artist hat. It's the new way to draw and paint.

But, today, I didn't paint, draw, or write, with the exception of this post. I am angry at nothing, and everything. The dogs are pissing me off. The leech upstairs pisses me off. My runny nose irritates me. The obese gut that is now rolling over my belt irks me to no end. I'm pissed that I have to take so much damn medicine to keep cholesterol from clogging my veins and junk from sticking to my artificial valve. I'm nearly at the point where I could just walk out the door and never return.

I'm tiring of life.

A Look Back at 2007

Boy, that year sucked so hard, you could hear it. Good riddance, 2007. Don't ever return again.

Children of Men

Just saw Children of Men the other night on the telly. A friend brought over the DVD and he, his friend, my wife, and I watched the movie with rapt attention. If you haven't seen it, you really should. It is worth watching for several reasons.



First, the story is good. The theme isn't blindingly new, but it is prescient. More on this later.



Second, the acting is very good. Everyone is believable, and they're easily recognizable. The hero, Theo, is cast in my favorite mold: the little guy who gets caught up in something that he finds very hard to ignore. His sketchy past is revealed through snippets that show him to be someone who used to care very much about the problems of the world, but eventually slipped into the slave-wage rat race world, hoping to disappear and forget.



Many of the extras lend credibility to this, as London is depicted as a very dirty and hopeless place for the majority of the population. There is an eerie parallel to Baghdad. In one scene, Theo visits a relative, Nigel, who lives inside a barricaded section of the city where the elite still cling to their illusions. Nigel has servants, uses his chauffeur to take his Rolls to shuttle Theo about, and sports a huge Picasso in the dining room. It looks like the green zone inside Baghdad.



Third, the cinematography is top-notch. There are at least two scenes -- two very long scenes -- that were taken with one shot. Kubrick toyed with this, Altman used it in A Prairie Home Companion, and Alfonso Cuarón made it work in this film. The long shot itself is commendable, because it takes a lot of coordination between all the people involved. The real beauty of these scenes, however, is the way the camera moves around, seemingly floating around the characters, in and out of cars and buildings, and never once revealed by a shadow or other snafu. Well, at least from what I saw...



The prescience I mentioned earlier is the portrait that is painted of the world.



We see xenophobia, Homeland Security signs, propagandist advertising, the glorification of death, the loss of youth, and the hopelessness that surely follows the acceptance of the end of everything that was once normal and comfortable.



As I remarked during the battle scenes in the prison, it looked a lot like a contemporary war. In fact, it looked like someone's vision of the current situation in Iraq. There was a well-equipped army fighting several zealous factions who either wanted an end to the bloodshed and bigotry, or the beginning of a fruitless civil uprising. It's happening now in Baghdad and Palestine.



The one ray of hope, of course, lay in the world's only baby. Symbolically, the mother and the baby survive the journey out of the madness and take a trip across the water (usu. a metaphor for the subconscious). Their goal is an unseen place called The Human Project.



There are several layers of symbolism, and more than enough to keep just about anyone's mind busy with interpretation. My wife saw newspaper clippings that denounced Bush. The baby has an unknown father. The hero must sacrifice himself so that the child lives. Only women were stricken with the sudden inability to procreate. The baby, just through the act of being seen, was the only thing that stopped the fighting, if only temporarily. The mother was black and the only soldier that crossed himself and genuflected was black.



The list goes on.



Children of Men is the kind of movie that the Wachowski brothers should have made when they came up with the idea for The Matrix. It's smart, real, and a fine example of everything that Hollywood isn't. Alfonso stuttered and coughed with his earlier films (well, at least the english-language ones), but this one is very, very smooth.

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Arcana Unbound

There used to be a time long ago when the elite chanted passages from tomes written in a language no one understood. It was a crafty ploy meant to keep the sheepish masses ignorant, especially since this same elite class (priests) demanded tithes and such in order to please the gods they worshiped. The people wouldn't have been so compliant if they knew how to speak to the gods themselves, now would they?

And so, as time has passed, so has the grip the priests once had upon the followers. The words are now clearly understood. Everyone can read holy texts. Each one of us can now speak to the gods and the tithes are voluntary, with one or two exceptions.

But now, the god in the sky has become the god in the green. Money is the contemporary idol of worship. The sacrifices people make for this new god have quite often led to broken marriages, heart failure, lung cancer, alcoholism, usury, and all sorts of variations of backstabbing. It has also led us to the creation of a new class of elites: the Corporate Officers.

Their language is horribly arcane. How many people who have not been gifted with the proper codec really understand the following quote taken from the Wikipedia article of "value proposition":

[T]he value proposition concept is a valuable tool to utilize with each important constituency as it forces you to look both internally and externally in crafting a statement that is actionable by you and/or your company, while being credible and compelling to your target audience.

Would it not be clearer to just say:

Value Proposition is a concept that helps one understand how you can fool people into buying or using your product.

Perhaps being too blunt in the conference room works against one's interests. If the meeting attendees were better able to precisely communicate their thoughts, meeting frequencies would be halved, and the hoards of useless management folks would have nothing to do.

This is a good reason to keep the language in the business place thoroughly ambiguous. It masks the ineptitude of the ones who are supposed to be guiding the ones doing the work.

Pre-Season Post-Holiday Blues

Prolog:
I sit at my desk, late at night, on a Sunday before another rushed work day. The niacin flush kicked in earlier, spreading patches of itchy heat all over me. For some reason, it always starts with my scalp. The relentless itching is almost enough to drive one insane.

Heated Within:
Every woman in the world I have come to know has had hot flashes at some time in their lives. One might think that the flashes are a consequence of human femininity. Without the introduction of certain chemicals, this is true. There are drugs, like premarin, that help women cope with hot flashes.

The male innards are different. Men have to put something into themselves in order to get hot flashes. One of these substances is niacin. I take this for my triglyceride problems, so I'm feeling the hot sting just about every night. It is usually not bad, but there are those nights....

So, why the hell do I keep taking the vitamins that throw me into fits of itch? It's the cholesterol, stupid -- those damn triglycerides that float around like friends who will not go away.

Cartoon Analysis:
Moral Orel was on the Cartoon Channel last night? Oh. My. Gawd.

That is all I can say. Miss Censorall, the town librarian, goes on a pious rampage and Orel gets totally duped into protesting for the lamest of reasons. Orel goes too far, as usual, and gets the group to boycott eggs. Miss Censorall likes eggs, but reluctantly goes to the protests. When the town enacts a law to ban eggs, the librarian sneaks away to find the "secret" place where eggs can be used in all sorts of unsavory ways.

What caught my eye about this episode was the surreal scene endings. The first bizarre scene (and act) closing has Orel eating a pickled egg and getting his mouth caressed by Miss Censorall. While she's a-strokin', she says things like: "Yes...that's what I need is another young mind to mold..." Actually, she said something a little different, but I won't be able to transcribe the dialog until I review it.

The strange thing was the combination of the way the librarians's hand was playing with Orel's mouth, along with Orel's low-wattage expression. It was as though he was completely entranced with Miss Censorall's hokey words.

The ending, however, is the clincher. Not only does the egg represent just about anything that fundamental piety manages to render illegal, it also has a deeply symbolic significance to every human being. The egg is a metaphor for re-birth. Much of known mythology includes stories about heroes and gods that go through a never-ending cycle of life and death, and who come back to life from an egg or a womb.

Right. Well, we now can see that the egg is most clearly just a simple metaphor, most likely meant to be terribly absurd. Unfortunately, the fundie chant of "Down with the eggs that came from 'tween the legs," makes perfect repressive-disorder sense. I might raise an eyebrow when eggs start disappearing from shelves and we find out that they are far too bad for us to eat.

The librarian visits the chicken coop, pays the entry fee, and is lead through the house back to a small room with a shade for a door. On her journey, we see someone gorging on eggs, guys with flashlights watching chickens lay eggs, someone dancing with a chicken, and a few other crazy obsessions . The farmer shows her in the room, asks her how she wants her egg, hands it to her, and closes the drape. We discover that Miss Censorall likes her eggs au naturale.

She stands in the small room. The camera is above her and begins with a closeup of her head. Miss Censorall rolls the egg over her face, moaning in pleasure. The camera slowly zooms out. As the moments pass, the librarian gets more ecstatic about having her egg.

Now, put alcohol in place of the egg. Get the picture?

Hopefully, if you had a chance to really see how dead-on the satire was, do something else. Have the egg replaced by something currently illegal, like drugs.

Epilog:
I sometimes think that a government can make just about anything legal, especially if there was a way to enforce a tax upon it. If the means of production and distribution would stay mainly with the masses, then a government would have some motivation to make it illegal.

Damn. Time for bed.

A Message to Husbands Everywhere

Husbands, there is something that you must know. A few of you are aware of this, but the vast majority are not. There is a plague of breast cancer in the world, and, even though it affects only women in the vast majority of cases, there is a profound effect which haunts the husbands of its victims.

While your wife suffers the pains of discovery, surgery, chemo-therapy, and radiation, you will not be spared from this thing from which you will have no escape. It will squeeze you, regardless of your strength. It shows no mercy. It is the one thing that you will not see coming.

You will be helpless. The cancer is indiscriminate, uncaring, and faceless. Once exposed, once initially removed and treated, you will discover this: there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

The cancer doesn't want you. It could care less about you. It's so far out of your reach, it doesn't even know you exist. You will be useless before it. And what's worse is that you will want to do something to help your wife, but you must watch her suffer throughout the entire ordeal.

So be prepared to fret. Find out if there are any old wives' hints for helping with fevers, vomiting, and sleepless nights. I can tell you that washcloths rung damp with cold water will help when the nausea is really bad. Just hand them to your wife and she'll know what to do.

Don't pester her with useless bullshit. Don't make her suffer through television shows and movies that she hates. When she says she wants a float with real vanilla ice cream, don't make the mistake of buying fat-free, sugar-free, totally tasteless, faux ice cream.

And most importantly, don't ever complain about your helplessness, because you will probably never know the pain she's living. If you start to wonder how she could be feeling so poorly, just try to imagine what would happen if your doctor found a cancerous tumor in one of your testes. Just think about the fact that it could be an indicator of something spreading to other organs in the immediate vicinity. Try to imagine how it would feel to have to face having your balls removed so you can live. Put yourself in your wife's shoes and think about having a couple of pints of medicine pumped into your body so it can destroy everything that remotely looks like a cancer cell. Pretend you're the one on the couch heaving bile out of your stomach every hour, every time they fill you with the "cure". Imaging having your groin repeatedly saturated with radiation. It would probably be the first time you would have the chance to feel a horrid sunburn on places which usually never see the sun -- over and over again.

Once you make that journey, you'll hopefully have the guts to sit close to your wife and genuinely comfort her. You'll be able to get beyond the silly macho herothink. After all, it's much easier to accept your own pain and mortality, especially when you believe you're taking the suffering from someone else -- just like a hero.

When you realize the love of your life may not live as long as you, and when you know deep down that there is nothing at all you can do to stop it, you will find yourself face-to-face with a nightmare come true. Your real heroism will show itself in how you handle your fears.