Upon Contemplating Solzhenitsyn

We were lost when we came to find ourselves,

unaware that we had been arrested—

On the Gulag floor ‘mist lice and ill-health,

We were blank men, torpid, vile, dejected;

Dying ones there told us what’s expected.

We had not heard the knock upon the door,

nor the clinking sound of gates erected,

and no one knew what he was taken for,

Nor why boots pushed his teeth into the floor.

The man who tortured me sold real estate,

in civilian life, a father of four.

Our heads but not our minds upon a plate;

They chopped our hair with rusty garden sheers;

Post-Saddam, these were American years.

Response to "Scandal in the Media."

I know that the point Louis Avallone was trying to make in his March 19 Forum article, "Scandal and the Media,"LINK was that the media establishment gives a "pass" to sexual deviants who are Democrats and rides Republican ones out of town on a rail. That this is his point is made clear by his statement of this very proposition, but not in any way by the evidence he offered to support it, much of which is based on casual conclusions and, in at least one notable case, a falsehood. A close look at this article’s false claim, I think, reflects also the irrational divisions that have come to define much of our current political environment.

Mr. Avellone is upset that several news programs covered the Eliot Stitzer scandal without making clear that he was a Democrat. He points out that several congress people who were touched by scandal were clearly labeled Republican. This, incidentally, is an much-discussed and, to my mind, meaningless issue that is currently being warmed over in the "conservative" blog world. I suppose I would be more likely to look to my past experiences as a television watcher and remind myself that, in my experience, the news usually does not attribute party affiliation to Governors, yet almost always does to Congress people. At any rate, he gives a list of Democrats that have been involved in scandals, and it is here that he leaves the world of opinion and enters the land of libel.

Mr. Avellone brings up the case of Congressman Barney Frank, and says that Frank had ". . . permitted the operation of a homosexual prostitution ring in his home in 1989." This is an admittedly excellent example that might serve to shows a relative difference in treatment between Democrats and Republicans involved in sexual scandal (Frank is, after all, still in Congress). This is such a compelling example in fact that one is almost tempted to overlook the fact that it is untrue.

Though there were allegations that he had done so, Frank, who fully cooperated with them, was cleared by the Congressional Ethics Committee in 1990 of any such knowledge that his premises were used for any improper activity. He was however reprimanded for fixing a friend’s parking tickets and for trying to influence the parole status of the same friend, the only pieces of incriminating evidence to come out of the investigation.

This particular libel is an old one, but it has recently been revived in the service of partisan political attacks, another rusty weapon that must be used because it is there. Media Matters has documented the following two cases that relate to this issue: In August of 2007, Pat Buchanan, a conservative journalist and former Presidential candidate, made the statement that Frank, "had a fellow running a—basically a full-service whorehouse in his basement." It is interesting, and not altogether un- instructive, to note that this statement was in reaction to more contemporary Congressional sex scandals, of which the case of Congressman Larry Craig was then the latest example. Craig had just recently (strangely) pled guilty to soliciting a policeman for sex in a public bathroom. He later said that in spite of this he was innocent of the charge. (Congressman Craig had incidentally been one of three members of the House Ethics Committee who had pushed for the harshest of punishments for Barney Frank in 1990.)

The second example of this calumny is to be found in a recent edition of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. On March 12, 2008, in reaction to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, virtually the same comment was made as crude satire by a Bill Clinton impersonator who, while jokingly extolling the tolerance of the Democratic Party, said, "You can be a prostitute . . . or like Barney Frank, let a prostitution ring be run out of your home." So, the point is, by the time Mr. Avellone’s article was published in the Forum, this particular bit of nonsense had made its way into the blogosphere, or semiosphere, or whatever sphere it is where people who don’t won’t to be bothered with things like facts and details go to find out what to talk about.

As is often the case, it is perhaps more important to examine why people are saying something rather than what they are saying. I’m just guessing here but I think this is yet another example of the general culture of opposition. I honestly don’t think any of Mr. Avellone’s details show much of a double standard; I think his argument and the article itself merely show how reactive our political environment has become.

At the heart of this reactive environment is a binary and Manichean view of the world. The idea that there are two equal and opposite worldviews, one Democrat and one Republican, is now so firmly wedged into our cultural narrative that it has become a conditioned reflex for people to just attack each other, and no one seems to care whether or not what he or she says is even true. It is a perspective that is reinforced by such trite phrases as "both sides of the isle." Moreover, it has the effect of encouraging people to see the world through a distorted lens where everything is an endless cycle of reaction, and where any criticism of my side must necessarily be "balanced" with an equal or greater criticism of your side.

This is the situation we find ourselves in, in 2008. Although many of us who think this is a counterproductive and obscure way of looking at the world, it appears, at least, to be the dominant view in the media, if Mr. Avellone’s article is any example.

A James Joyce Scat

No greater love hath a man that he lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Then it came to pass that they crossed the Ozarks to reach the land of milk and money, and there he purchased a hamburger, of which his goodly wife would have to understand, for the tavern-master would not otherwise allow him to watch the game, and there saw he the very Saints themselves beaten into the ground by Giants, so severe were these Giants that they full sore oppressed each challenger with mighty dispatch and were destined to reach the bowl after which they quested.

This be no benefit to Sir Traveler who was of the throwback cloth and, unlike others of his order, had a true faith in the intercession of saints. For relief he and one of his kind were beguiled by blasphemous parchments that could only be acquired on the Internet, at a cost of 100 per diem.

They too quested after the bowl and took faith that even Jesu knew not the day or the hour. And they tacked messages upon the doors of the church to give comfort to them who were also given to the faith of saints. “Be it next year,” saith they.

Aphorism #1

One proposition proved true by Jesus and Socrates is that people who rigidly adhere to moral precepts are much like those people who always drive the speed limit. They disrupt the flow of traffic and everyone hates them.

Dream of Sept. 15, 2007

This evening I had what was among the most vivid dreams I have ever had. Had it been a film I might have said the director was mad. First, I was an insurance salesman who was walking off, jogging off, to get breakfast for a client. I was in a city unfamiliar to me, but my dream self, Dream Me, knew it quite well. (Note: I am now remembering that I had left my house also because the Golden Girls sans Sophia were getting naked there).

My client was an old woman whom I knew to be senile; she wanted only Cap'n Crunch cereal. I found a smarmy waiter in an out-of-doors cafe who took the order but required, before hand, a tip/bribe of five dollars; I had only one ten, a one, and (strangely enough) a three dollar bill. I did not want to give him the ten on principle—Dream Me doesn't need the money.

After getting change, I gave him five, but then a major shift (plot twist?) occurred and I was unable to receive the order—famished client will no doubt haunt me in my next dream!—I was thrown into a wormhole which brought me to a strange land (My dream self was at such a loss) which was being torn apart by unknown forces.

I found a method of escape back to Broadmoore by floating on red bricks. This was the only way out of the devastation. A race of industrious lizard people who were indigenous to the area had created this expensive method of escape for the unexplained many who had found themselves in this strange land. These bricks were a prized commodity among the natives who depended on transportation charges for their existence. (Had they also brought us here?)

So expensive were these bricks that bipedal creatures were sold only two, on which they were expected to stand for a period that I was given to believe would be some months' time. I tried to explain to the creatures that I and my friends, for by now I was representing a number of other humans who had found themselves in this odd situation, were not of a species that could be expected to stand for such a long time, and would, therefore, require additional bricks.

I argued before the appeals tribunal of lizard magistrates, who were tan and green (my thesis committee?). I prepared a brilliant ad hoc case, or so I believed. while wobbling badly on two bricks, I presented my argument. I argued through algebra and prime numbers (such is the brilliant logician that is Dream Me) that the moral precepts represented in the Principle of Universality demanded we be given better accommodations. Fairness and equality of condition after all demanded it.

The tribunal was unimpressed. It did not appear to them that the humans were at all equal in any respect, so unlike the beautiful, streamlined lizard genus of their home world. "Of course, that is why we need better accommodation." I was reaching. "Since we are unlike, we need to accommodate the mean"—whatever that meant! This, however, impressed them as being very reasonable and we immediately received a yacht of red bricks. And in this manner we began the long journey home.

###

I Got a New Chair Today.

When I got to work today, there was a new chair at my desk. I had been wanting a new one as the old one was at least 3 ½ years old, and like most of the furnishings and equipment in my classroom, I had inherited it from my predecessor. Today is also the day we were expecting a visit from the corporate office's director of curriculum. We are a lonely outpost seldom visited by anyone from those distant parts. Even before I had sat down in the chair and fingered its firm cushions and luxuriant newness, I remembered the film Stalag 17, how the Germans had given new blankets to the prisoners-of-war only to take them away after the visiting Red Cross officials had left. I sat down and leaned back. There was not the creaking sound that I had become accustomed to, the one that would always disturb the rare silence that would fall over the crowded room during a testing session.

It occurred to Cassie on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.

So Cassie walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cassie, this is important.” Opening the letter she found the following words It's about time you looked there. You always take so long to do things. Your father was like that. Please be more observant in the future.

For a while, Cassie sat down in a kind of strange trance. Whatever would have motivated her long-dead mother to have such an odd message on the back of that picture all those years ago? She strained to remember something that would have explained it. Seeing there was no date on the yellowing paper, she sat stunned. Then she laughed. Cruel joke, she thought. The old bitch playing mind games with me beyond the grave. She no doubt had put it there. . . yes, she placed it there to be . . . a cruel joke! She did not just send me a letter; that's not possible, so it must be that it was her senility, a product of her senility—made her a mean bitch at the end, though in truth mother and daughter were close.

Of course, any alternative explanation, one that might involve time machines, navigable multi-verses, worm holes—Einstein on the other end puffing away at his pipe; bad science fiction, all of it!—would have been rejected before even being entertained. Science fiction was fine when it kept to its metaphoric functions; it was ridiculous when it called attention to its otherness, sensational stories meant to excite the middle brow fan. It was a sad comment on society. Astronomy had divorced astrology some centuries before, but in within the pages and plasma screens of the modern entertainment landscape, science had not yet (or again) detached from its fictions. Two thousand years of slouching ignorance: I believe it 'because' it is absurd—I believe it is a poem, Father.

When will I go home again? Cassie's grandfather had asked. She was a girl, and he was in a hospital bed. --Soon, she assured him as he watched the magic lantern show on the wall. Said he saw a man skiing down the plaster and made a passing comment. The next time she saw him he was in another room and everyone was sad and so was she. And for the first time she felt hopeless. At the house, she went into granddad's room and out the window saw sunlight shinning on a pine tree. It was a warm early-summer day. She smelled his stale tobacco in the air and knew that magic would never touch her life again.

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