The Air of Authority

It’s a sub-audible buzzing, like the electromagnetic field given off by a malfunctioning motor that isn’t turning. It’s a warning that lives in the air.

Don’t talk about politics.

But Dad and stepmom had Fox News on. They were making supper and I was sitting at the table. I said, “Shhh, listen to what Fred Barnes is saying.”

In unison, they said they don’t like Fred Barnes.

“You don’t like Fred Barnes? He’s William Kristol’s sidekick at The Weekly Standard.” What Bushie doesn’t like The Weekly Standard?

Dad said “Fred Barnes is a traitor,” and I remembered how Barnes and Kristol and just about all the analysts at Fox News had been pretty soft on Obama, from what I could tell watching the debates. In my circle of friends, I had insisted that we watch the debates on Fox News, because all TV news is lame, and you might as well watch the lamest and know what the enemy knows. I call it “having access to his intelligence.”

After each debate, I thought that either side could make the case that they had won. But the Fox analysts never gave it to McCain. I remember them saying once, “McCain had to make a knockout punch tonight, and he just didn’t.” I was like, “Huh? Who cares if he did or didn’t. Just declare it. He did it! Yes you can, too!”

I mean, Fox News had no trouble declaring Florida a victory for Bush in 2000, right? And Republicans’ beacon for the future seems to have declared a victory in Iraq. Why not just say, “McCain has the experience and clearly looks like he’s in control. He doesn’t deliver a knockout punch because he doesn’t have to. Everyone knows, it’s the quiet guys who are the strongest.”

I mean, if I can write that, so can they. It was like they weren’t even trying any more.

“We like Charles Krauthammer,” my dad and stepmom said, enthusiastically. “You know he’s paralyzed,” they said, with the same reverence they have for McCain’s handicap.

Krauthammer talked about how the surge was heroic and successful for reducing violence. I kept my mouth shut on this one. I have read much (this entry cites useful references) about the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad being the deeper cause for relative peace in that city; and the paying of our former insurgent enemies, who used to be in the Iraqi army that we disbanded, to stop being insurgents and start cooperating with the Iraqi army, as mostly causing the relative peace in Anbar and other Sunni provinces.

I didn’t launch this Iraq 101 lecture, because I’m still a little rattled from my dad yelling at me on the beach this summer, “Do you think Osama bin Laden wanted to spend his life in a cave? We have to teach him a lesson. We have to make it really expensive for him to attack us.” (As if Bin Laden had not chosen in the 80's his life as a rebel; as if he didn't intend to lure us into undecisive wars in the Middle East; as if it's more expensive for him to attack us than for us to retaliate against someone besides him.) Dad had not really yelled at me much all my life because I was a very tame (depressed) kid. So it’s maybe harder for me to take in adulthood than for other adult children who are accustomed to being yelled at by their dads.

As for my stepmom, while she does read fairly deeply about lots of things, there are certain modes of thought she won’t give up. Apparently, the basic unsubstantiated pro-Iraq war stance still appeals to her.

Many topics are fair game. One afternoon Dad and I talked about the origins of life. He painted for me a picture of a gradual continuum in which, at first, there were only elements and compounds scattered around our planet; then, because of erosion of rocks and churning of seas and formation of tide pools and lightning striking, some chemicals would come together in certain ways and eventually form viruses; and lipids (which he said would exist without life, and would be floating around) would bond and actually make a “container” sort of like a cell membrane. Eventually proteins would come together as DNA, find their way into one of these lipid cases, and start replicating. And then you’re off and running. He says, “You’re damn right there’s life on other planets.” And he reminded me of a problem in detecting it -- we can only view the electromagnetic radiation from a planet (its light and TV or radio signals, or whatever they emit) from many years in the past -- the number of light years that planet is away from us. So, life could be there now but not be evident in the information coming from that planet. Or, we could detect life in what we see, but that life might not be there any more. Life has only been on earth for a tiny fraction of the time of existence of the earth, and it’s likely anyone looking for its signs here would miss them. It could be the speed of light that indeed isolates us.

(A quick look on the Planet Quest Atlas shows three terrestrial exoplanets under 100 light years away; one 1000 light years away; two others at least 9000 light years away.)

I can’t sit around keeping all my political thoughts to myself. I have to put a little of my camp into things. Since Stephen Colbert attended our small college for two years, he is not a totally off-limits topic. In the course of talking about energy and algae farming, I told them about Colbert’s Formidable Opponent sketch about offshore drilling vs. alternative fuels. When I was done, Dad said that that was pretty funny. But an awkward silence fell. How can such an awkward silence come to 3 people who really all know each other pretty well -- who are basically pretty sensitive and smart?

Or consider the conversation where they told me about the show Ice Road Truckers. I said The Daily Show had made a joke about it. My stepmom said, “They would. It’s sort of a redneck show, the kind of thing the elite like to joke about.” So there you have it -- she has absorbed and replicated the Republican line that moderate or liberal entertainment is elite.

They also didn’t seem to want to talk about oil speculators. I think oil speculators are fascinating. It’s a whole market in which oil contracts are traded, not actual oil. And some say this is causing large fluctuations in oil prices, while others say the speculators are not that big a deal. Dad insisted that mostly, it’s just supply and demand affecting oil prices. I suppose this issue could be the subject of legitimate debate, but Dad and stepmom seemed to want to avoid the subject altogether.

So what’s this palpable aversion to certain subjects? I think I’ve arrived at the answer, though it does not seem like much of a revelation. It’s that they believe in authority, a basic moral decency, a just cause for our nations actions. They are not comfortable with anything that subverts this notion. So if I talk about the Iraq war, that subverts their idea of the just cause for it; if The Daily Show makes fun of Ice Truckers, that detracts from the classic struggle of Man against Nature; if I talk about oil speculators, this implies that there are participants in our free market that are making money at the expense of the rest of us in the free market -- a “no honor among merchants” analog to the mantra about thieves (though again, reasonable people are saying speculators are not the biggest influence on oil prices).

On the other hand, I love subversion, as long as it is exposing that someone in authority does not know what they are talking about. And maybe in general we can say that conservatives like the authoritative establishment and liberals like a more rebellious stance.

Our best illustration of this divide between myself and my family came when Dad, my stepmom, and me were sitting in the Belgian bakery in town. My stepmom was telling me about Elsa’s business. Elsa is her daughter-in-law who is the iciest neocon of them all. “She has a room full of failed marketing projects,” my stepmom said. “[Elsa’s daughter] had to learn her catechisms, and Elsa made these cards with catechisms printed over images from the Book of Kells. She had 3000 of these made in India, got them shipped to her, and now they’re sitting in the guest room. She sold a few on Amazon, but only a handful.”

I had learned about the Book of Kells somewhere, but had to be reminded. My stepmom explained it’s an Irish book of scripture.

Apparently it’s in the public domain now.

I said, “She should market to Evangelicals -- make some cards that would sell in megachurches. I bet there’s money there, if she’s willing to step it down from Catholicism. Evangelicals don’t care about no Kells though. That's too heavy, like ancient grains. They like their religion simpler, like white rice.”

My stepmom said that Catholics are not a shrinking population, with the influx of Hispanics.

“Okay,” I said. “But they don’t care about Kells either. So tell your Irish-Catholic daughter-in-law to get those Hindu and Muslim Indians to print up some cards in Spanish, with the Virgin of Guacamole on them, or whatever it’s called. That’ll sell like hotcakes.”

More awkward silence.

Continue . . .

Summary only...

My Colbert Rapport

It’s a great thing to do in New York. For me, there’s this buzz of anxiety that I may not get in. When I do, it’s like a personal achievement, not just something like The Lion King that’s assured for anyone who can purchase a ticket. This time, I was with Svetx, and we didn’t merely want to get in -- I had comments to voice to Colbert during his question and answer session. He and I have walked the same ground, at the same time. We have a commonality in our pasts. I had to make sure I was called on and spoke about this without sounding like an idiot in front of the other audience members.


Svetx and I approached from the west, Riverside Park, and there was a guy already there, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, reading his business magazines. He was 1st standby, and we claimed 2nd and 3rd. I had told Svetx that if we were to be separated, with one of us admitted in and the other not, that she should be the one to go in.

We sat. The sidewalk smelled like piss, but I could not find an actual puddle anywhere. I figured it was dry piss we were sitting in -- piss baked into the concrete along with the dried and blackened chewing gum. Thank goodness for whatever sanitizing properties the sun provides, in summer at least.

I tried to sleep, something I’d never tried to do in the past on the sidewalks of Manhattan. I guess I’m getting used to the place. I closed my eyes, but noises played across the insides of my lids like richocheting billiard balls, sometimes coming toward me and making me start and open my eyes again.

The standby line built up to maybe 8 or 10 people. In December of 2005 I had done this, and there had only been 3 standbys. Being the first back then, I had read all the signs and directed others, as they had arrived, to whatever line was appropriate for them: ticket holder, standby, and VIP. One ticket holder that I assisted came back to me from her line a few minutes later and said “I guess I should offer my extra ticket to you -- I have a friend who’s not coming.”

Her name was Wendy and she had purple hair. I joined her in line, and she talked about how she had looked up Colbert’s wife and thought she looked kind of plain; how she imagined that Jon Stewart was the “voice” of the text which appears in counterpoint to Colbert’s monologue, “The Word.”

Wendy’s friends arrived. She told them how winter was always hard for her in the city because she thinks about the animals, particularly the horses who have to stand in the cold, blindered, for the benefit of tourists. I’ve thought a lot about Wendy since then, in light of how my Dad thinks liberals, such as the attendees at Woodstock or students at Oberlin, his alma mater, are all sick and depressed people. And I’ve previously written about my family member who said, with the support of most of the rest of the family, that a bomb should have been dropped on Woodstock. I think Wendy is the type of person they are denigrating, and psychologically, I find myself more aligned with her than with my family. Sure, we’re kind of melancholic, it’s because we are sensitive. She sees the horse and buggy ride worries about the horse. I see my country taking the fight to the terrorists in a short-sighted manner, and I worry about the implications for the people of the Middle East, most of whom have nothing to do with 9/11.

This time, there was not Wendy. There was the guy in front of us who would start an entry-level job at an investment firm the next day, and expected to be working 70 hours weeks for pretty low pay, until he had proven himself and could move up the ladder.

And behind us was a couple from Seattle who had come to New York because their daughter had won a chance to meet J.K. Rowling. Their daughter was not with them. They looked like such suburbanites that I was surprised to find them at Colbert. I talked about the time in 2005 when I had been to Stewart’s show, the night before I had been to Colbert’s. Some audience members had asked Stewart if he could get them into Colbert’s taping right after Stewart’s that same night, so during a commercial break Stewart set up a remote link to Colbert just to ask this question. Stewart put his feet up on his desk and posed the question to Colbert. Colbert asked if they were cute. Then he said, “I’ve got a seat right here,” and slapped his hands in his lap.

The suburbanites laughed, and I decided they were cool.

The ticket holder line was shorter than it had been in 2005, and when the doors opened, we were all admitted, all ticket holders and standbys.

Security was tighter now too. More guards were on hand, all dressed in blue blazers and kakhi pants, all very nice and professional and respectful of us. I imagine that Colbert himself had vetted them with an eye toward keeping an air of good humor. They searched our bags and ushered us through a metal detector.

Inside the holding room, a TV was mounted up on a wall. It showed highlights from past shows. This had not been there in 2005. Colbert’s interviews with Eleanor Holmes Norton were among the clips playing.

The audience manager stood on a pedestal and got our attention. He said he was going to ask us questions, and those who gave correct answers would get free T-shirts. Though it’s against the positive attitude my therapist and Svetx and other friends advise me to maintain, I felt inadequate for this challenge. Through 2006 and the first part of 2007, I could not find anyone who knew Colbert’s shows better than I. But I have not had cable at my house for a year, and my advantage has slipped. The first question was to name 4 musical guests that have appeared on the show. I did the wrong thing, which was to think. I thought of Toby Keith, who said that our war in Afghanistan is going great; I thought of Willie Nelson, who had told Colbert that his ice cream flavor was “Right good.” I thought of Barry Manilow, about how Colbert often sings harmony on one verse when the musical guest performs. While I was thinking all this, someone else was answering. The audience manager threw a wadded T-shirt to him. It seemed to travel in a straight line over the audience members’ heads, without unfurling.

This hesitation would never do if I was going to have my interaction with Colbert during Q&A.

Next question was: Name 4 items on Colbert’s set. Again I froze, feeling rusty, though of course I could name 4 items. The guy who answered listed Colbert’s C-shaped desk as one. The audience manager said this was lame, but he threw him a T-shirt anyway.

Then: Name Colbert’s home state.

My arm shot up with all the earnestness of that guy in the front row on Welcome Back Kotter.

“Yes, go ahead,” the audience manager said to me. He was like Colbert -- he had dark hair parted on one side, glasses, a way of raising one eyebrow with affected earnestness. Behind those glasses, it was hard to see who his roving eyes had lit upon, but it seemed it was me, and for an instant I forgot the ridiculously easy answer. Then I remembered it: South Carolina.

A T-shirt came hurtling at me, above the heads. I snagged it and pulled it in. It was mine.

Questions were over, and the audience manager stepped down for a little while. Another audience member came up to me. “You look familiar,” he said.

I looked at him. The beard wasn’t right, but the glasses were, and so were the voice and the small eyes behind the glasses.

“You look familiar to me too,” I said.

He explained himself in a stream of words in which I caught “casting call” and “South Carolina.”

“Beauty and the Geek!” I said. “Nathan!” The host geek!

He had been a geek on the first season of the show, and had attracted notice from the producers as having a good presence on camera and in real life, a well-rounded personality that extended well beyond his role as a “geek.” Beauty Jennylee had similar qualities, and the two became friends. They were given jobs as co-hosts for the second season. He and Jennylee went around the country doing casting calls, and I had been their audio guy in North Carolina.

In fact, here is Jennylee taking a picture of herself in front of one of the places where we did the casting calls. On the right edge of frame is the local cameraman who hired me on the job. I was probably standing just off frame to the right.

Nate said he was now teaching middle school social studies in Brooklyn. He had thought he recognized me by sight, but when I spoke out loud "South Carolina," he knew exactly where he knew me from. He said Jennylee was in LA doing some modeling and acting stuff. It was great to see him.

The audience manager came back to answer questions. We learned that Colbert was very upset when he was disqualified from running for president of the U.S. in South Carolina because you can’t have a TV show about yourself and be a candidate; that the day of Colbert’s accident that broke his wrist had come after many weeks of Colbert staying at the studio every night after taping the show, until midnight, to work on his book. His exhaustion had lead to his slipping that day when he had run into the studio to greet the audience. And yet, in great pain, Colbert had done the show, then still delayed going to the doctor for another two weeks.

We learned that when Colbert stole Bill O’Reilly’s microwave oven, they found O’Reilly’s lunch in it. Colbert had just walked out through O’Reilly’s security carrying it in the manner of Jeff Lebowski: “He said I could have any rug in the house.”

And we learned that Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus, has forbidden all Democrats from appearing on Colbert’s Better Know of District series. Colbert can hardly get any congressman to appear any more.

We were told that while the audience manager was keeping us entertained, Stephen and the crew were in rehearsal, and that when they were through they would go into rewrites while the audience would be ushered into the studio.

We were told not to ask for autographs or to ask Colbert his political affiliation.

We entered the studio behind the tiered stands where we would sit. Hanging black curtains guided us to the end of the stands where we would walk around to the front, but as we walked I peered backward between some curtains to see if I could glimpse the man himself engaged in rewrites. All I saw were a production assistant and some hanging work lights and orange extension cords.

We were seated and told that the interview for the night, with Kevin Costner, had been previously taped because of scheduling problems. We watched the tape before Colbert appeared.

Then Colbert did appear, running out from the aisle between the two sets of stands, his hands out as if he had just made a touchdown, a stick mic in one hand. This was the run that lead to his fall that broke his wrist. He gets a standing ovation just for doing this, and then he goes to Q&A.

The first question came from a young woman who asked him to sing her Happy Birthday. He asked how old she was. 21, she said. He asked to see some I.D., so she showed him her driver’s license. Then he sang her Happy Birthday . . .

. . . in Latin. Lord knows where he learned that. It could be one of the geeky things he taught himself, like Aragorn’s genealogy, or the Apostle’s Creed. But this did tie in to what I had to ask him. See, I grew up at a small college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. My dad was a biology teacher there. Colbert had attended Hampden-Sydney for two years, been turned on to acting by the acting teacher there whom I knew (named in the previous link), and went to Northwestern to finish college. Colbert had said that Hampden-Sydney was a hard school for him at the time. He had studied classics and had a rough time of it.

I had asked a classics and Latin professor, JA, if he had had Colbert in his class. He said promptly, “No.” This was at one Christmas dinner back home.

This past Christmas, at another dinner, I asked HS, a retired professor of English, if he had had Colbert as a student. “Yes,” he promptly said. He said Colbert had asked him for a recommendation to go to Northwestern, and he had not heard from Colbert since. He seemed a little hurt by that.

Another audience member stood up and started talking about Colbert’s favorite Bollywood star. Having been out of touch with the show for a year, this was a little over my head. After they had talked about this a bit, Colbert said, “We are alienating the rest of the audience.”

This audience member asking the question claimed to know this Bollywood star, said the star is in town this week, and said the star wants to be on his show. Colbert looked over at an assistant, a real assistant, not the Bobby that appears on the show, and asked in what sounded like a genuinely stern tone why the Bollywood star had not been invited. The assistant had no answer.

Then the audience member said, “And I know you don’t do autographs, but for [the Bollywood star], would you?” He held up a magazine and Sharpie.

I thought, oh shit, he’s going to piss Colbert off and he won’t take any more questions.

The audience manager appeared out of nowhere frowning and said in exasperation, “Give it to me.”

Colbert was now discussing something with the assistant. The audience manager took the magazine and Sharpie to him. I didn’t see what happened with all that.

Colbert then took another question from the other side of the stands. Each time he asked for questions I raised my hand with all the earnestness I could muster, feeling like a kid in a class about to burst with his answers. Colbert was alternating sides of the room calling on people. This one was on the opposite end. If it were not the last one he would take, he would next come to my side.

And he did. I couldn’t believe he was actually looking at me, calling on me.

I had deliberated on how to phrase this. I had decided against saying “I bring greetings from Hampden-Sydney college,” because I’m not really in touch with the college these days, and who knows if someone currently living there actually had come to Colbert recently and spoken about it. So I said, “I grew up at Hampden-Sydney college in Virginia.”

“Hampden-Sydney!” Colbert said, standing up a little straighter as though being called to duty by some old sworn fealty.

“My father was a professor there-”

“Who was he?” Colbert said.

“___ in biology,” I said, “but you didn’t have him.”

“No,” he said.

“But I know HS-”

“HS!” Colbert said, standing straighter still, that old fealty gripping him more deeply.

“Yes,” I said, “And when I was growing up and playing Dungeons and Dragons, it was with his kids that I played.”

The audience gave a little “Awwww,” at this.

“We are alienating the audience again,” Colbert said. Then, to fill them in, he went on. “My whole time at Hampden-Sydney, I felt like I was in a 19th century monastery. All Latin and classics. It is all-male. When I transferred to Northwestern, I couldn’t believe that there were women. There were women two floors away. One of our professors came to our room and smoked pot with us and ended up sleeping with my roommate. I was a lot more at home there.”

I said, “And did you have JA?”

“Yes, absolutely,” he said without hesitation. Then, continuing the background for the audience, “The place is a stalwart rock of southern conservatism founded by Patrick Henry in 1776. Tell me, are you conservative?”

He was asking me, and I had to say something intelligent right then, in front of all those people. I said, “Well, I formed my idea of spirituality playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I love your show.”

“You are seriously damaged,” he said.

Svetx and I were elated. I had won a T-shirt during the quiz (though the quiz was laughably easy), and managed to have some exchange with him. Whatever would happen next we did not care. We had completed our mission.

Colbert took his seat at his desk and his director started the countdown “5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .” not speaking the “2” “1” because, in television, the on-camera talent always finishes the numbers in his head and starts on “0”.

I remember very little of the show. I remember more from the 2005 show I went to, in which Colbert’s final statement of the Table of Contents portion was, “Step aside Oprah -- every member of this studio audience gets a free gift -- of the truth!”

In 2005 when I attended, both Colbert and Stewart did their shows straight through with no editing. This time, Colbert did stumble. It was right after they showed a clip of Obama rebutting McCain for making fun of him about the tire gauges. Obama reiterated that experts say Americans could save 3 % to 4% of our oil consumption by keeping our tires properly inflated. “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant,” Obama said.

When the video cut back to Colbert he fumbled his line, said “Fuck,” and put his head down on his desk. He stayed there for a few seconds, an eternity in TV. I thought they would keep taping straight through, but Colbert raised his head and told the technicians to run the clip back.

“From the beginning?” the director said.

“Play the whole Obama clip,” Colbert said. “We need to get into it.” Colbert, behind his desk, is not only the talent but the boss as well.

Some switcher or whatever backstage really has his act together. Without delay they rolled the clip again. “ . . . take pride in being ignorant.”

Colbert started with a more dramatic air this time, fumbled, and cursed again.

Take 3: “ . . . take pride in being ignorant.”

This time we audience members had our part down. “Ooooooohhhhh!” we went. And Colbert nailed his response, as if, in part, drawing from our input.

“Yes sir, we do,” he said, narrowing his eyes. He went on to declare one week of September “National Ignorance Month.”



Also on our night, he chose a spider to be named after himself.



Then, with the first and second acts done, there was nothing left. The Costner interview had already been taped. Colbert stood up and said, “It’s over already! Here, I’ll interview you,” he said, putting his arm around the shoulders of his floor director, who made like he was going to speak, then waved the mic away.

We were through. Outside, I called my dad and told him what had just happened, that Colbert had studied under HS and JA and remembered them both.

The audience manager came out a side door and took the magazine and Sharpie to the guy who had asked for Colbert’s autograph. “I’m sorry, sometimes it happens that way,” the manager said to him.

I told the manager he was doing a great job.

Nathan walked by with his friends, and we said our “laters . . .”

We had done it. Svetx and I had made it to Colbert. It’s always a thrill. It seems that it doesn’t matter what happens in New York after that.

Next time I see JA I’m going to tell him that his former student in classics, now a famous comedian and late-night show host, a ground breaker in political and social satire, the next big thing after post-modernism, is singing Happy Birthday in Latin. I’m gonna tell JA that maybe he should start remembering this student of his.

Continue . . .

Summary only...

Neocons at the Beach

My Neocon step-sister-in-law, let’s call her Elsa, told me she would not talk about politics this year. I said I’d love to hear what she had to say and would give her 15 minutes to talk uninterrupted by me. With an air of self-assuredness, she said she did not want to scare me. I said I knew what she would say anyway because I’ve been reading The Weekly Standard. She said, “What I’ve been parroting.” Yep.

I doubt she’s been reading what I parrot.

I wondered what she thinks would scare me. Last summer she told me, “Syria is useless. They should be bombed into glass.” Could it get more scary than that? It can get equally scary, at least. Here’s what came up over dinner one night.

Elsa was talking about the movie Parenthood in which a mother complains that she is having to police her son who is suspected of doing drugs. “I was at Woodstock for Chrissakes,” the mother says.


My family members all agreed it was a great line. Then Dad had to go into his standard line about Woodstock which is that the U.S. Army had to fly in portalets because there was no place for all those people to go to the bathroom. “People talk about peace and love,” my dad said, ”and here, it takes the Army to save them from disease. These people were just tramping around in mud. They had to have been miserable. You know, I was at Haight-Ashbury in the late 60’s, and most of the people I saw there looked pretty sullen.”

Elsa’s husband said, “They [the Army] should have dropped a bomb on them.”

Elsa piped up, “I know. These Bohemians are so . . .” she trailed off here, but I can imagine she meant that so-called Bohemians are self-righteous, or PC, or something like that. “I mean, I’m sorry,” she said, making her usual vague admission that she could be offending someone somewhere while presuming that everyone in the room agrees with her.

I tried to make a stand. “Well, if you’d dropped a bomb on them, you would have killed Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar.” I could not think of any more. Those are the only musicians I could name who I were at Woodstock. I don’t really know jack about Woodstock, actually.

“But they all died anyway,” Elsa’s husband said.

I had no response to that. I wish I had said, “Okay, who else is going to die anyway that we can go ahead and kill now?” Sounds like a good case for abortion if I ever saw one, Honk!

Did I mention that Elsa's husband is a surgeon?

I did think about bringing up another issue. While the Neocons would like to bomb the unsanitary Bohemians, following their urging our country has bombed Baghdad into un-sanitation. Why doesn’t our army drop a few portalets there? Instead of setting up those concrete barriers, they could make a wall of portalets. Kill two birds with one stone. Then, insurgents and merchants alike, wishing they could access the neighboring neighborhood, could at least pause to relieve themselves in a manner befitting American constructions workers. But I did not mention this because we were not talking about the war, and I don’t bring it up around family -- someone else needs to bring it up first.

Later that day, I was helping Dad grill salmon outdoors. Elsa was nearby. We heard an ice cream truck go by playing Swan Lake, and I said, “It’s playing Tchaikovsky. There’s something wrong with that.”

Elsa said, “Yeah. I can imagine Tchaikovsky coming from a music box--”

“--a nice music box,” I said,

“--yeah,” she said. “But not some Slav in an ice cream truck.”

Some Slav? Where did that come from? Okay, to be fair, many service jobs like that of grocery clerk on the island are filled by European teenagers on some kind of summer work arrangement. The island has no permanent residents, no indigenous teenagers to take those summer jobs. I’ve met Poles and Czechs in the grocery store, so I guess there are some Slavs somewhere.

Sounds like she presumes superiority to Slavs though. This makes me sorry I even presumed my own superiority to ice cream truck drivers and their listeners who do not know who wrote that tune. I mean, heck, I don’t know who wrote the circus music it normally plays.

Here is what I did say to her. “Well, it was March Slav, so it was okay.”



Dad said, “Is that the tune that goes Daaaa, Daa Da Da Dummmm?” He can sing. He used to sing and act in community theater. He played Nanki Poo in The Mikado and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Most of this was before I was born.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t get the reference,” Elsa said.

For the moment I had superiority over her.

Her own ethnic heritage is Irish. And she’s Catholic. Would there ever be “some Irishman in an ice cream truck”? It would be far more appropriate to talk about Irishmen in Irish Pubs, institutions which seem to be spreading according to some social ink-blot theory in the centers of some American towns including my own. We have at least 3 Irish pubs in the downtown area. One local blogger has discovered the master plan to set aside a whole block downtown for the Irish, a true Green Zone, if you will. Maybe someone should start Irish Pubs in the real Green Zone. They can invent a new mixed drink called The Mortar. There are already Car Bombs.

Maybe Irish pubs are like kudzu or the Nile perch -- they grow better outside their natural habitat.

If I were to open a bar, I’d call it the Non-Irish Pub. I would not exclude Irish any more than an Irish pub excludes non-Irish. It’s just that, you know, non-Irish has a certain flair, a certain atmosphere that everyone can enjoy. You get a waiter or bartender who has a non-Irish accent, you feel like it’s a special occasion. Americans who spent a semester abroad enjoying the hospitality of the friendly people outside Ireland get a little feeling of nostalgia. A non-Irish pub is just a place, you know, where folks in the community can gather and have a drink, let off some steam. Its something that all people, Tartars, Hittites, Turks, Druze can relate to.

You know, I’m really sorry I talked a little smack about an ice cream truck playing Tchaikovsky. Let them play freaking Berg’s violin concerto, for crying in a bucket. I don’t care who’s driving, be it a Jew or Serb. Heck, bring on the Mongols. I’m all about the hordes, as long as they’re bringing ice cream.

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A Meme of Past Glory II

12) I had another strange surge in popularity at another time in another place, when, at summer camp, I won the talent show for telling Steve Martin jokes. My 13) obsession with Steve Martin jokes had started when another member of our school carpool had told them. I had thought he was the funniest person I knew. So stole his game. I got the “Wild and Crazy Guy” album and memorized it and started telling Steve Martin jokes as well. By the time I was in full swing doing this, the other guy had changed schools and was no longer in our carpool, so he was not around to challenge me.


I told jokes I didn’t even get. One mother who sometimes drove the carpool thought I was hilarious and giggled as she drove.

In my second year at summer camp, the summer before seventh grade, I learned that I could gain prestige among my cabin mates by telling Steve Martin jokes while we were getting ready for bed in the evenings. One evening, our counselor told us that a talent show was coming and suggested I tell Steve Martin jokes for it. I didn’t want to at first, but a cabin mate said I should, that he would help me and coach me. So I wrote all the jokes out that I would tell and rehearsed them alone, and did a trial run in front of him. We figured out a point where I would ask the audience a question and he, as a plant, would yell out the answer.

At the talent show, other boys dressed up as women using soccer balls for boobs; they did the thing where one kid sits behind another and extends his arms and legs forward as if they are the limbs of the kid in front of him, and this “dual person” attempts to eat and brush his hair to the general entertainment of everyone watching. I’m sure, at some point, somebody wore a mop on his head. (This was a five-week, all-male camp. *shudder* 14) I went because there was nothing to do at home in the summertime, and because my mom had loved her summer camp back in her day. She had learned to love horses at her camp. 15) I had spent much of my very early childhood playing around a horse farm where my mother would go to ride, and I always thought that maybe, if someone had asked the horses how they felt about being ridden, they would give an answer the horseback riders did not want to hear. Anyway, by the time I went to camp I had already been put on a horse a few times, and I knew I did not like horseback riding. But I had to do it at camp. Thankfully this was not the focus of camp though. It was a general all-round sports, nature, character building camp for boys, with morning Christian devotions (16) this is where I learned the Lord’s Prayer). To be honest, I did get a lot of my character built in a good way there. But I had a lot of bad feelings, cried a lot, and do not associate the word “fun” with the experience. And really, so many of the kids were lacrosse players from the elite private school St. Christopher’s in Richmond, and had brought their own helmets and sticks and pads to camp, that a lot of the rustic atmosphere was undermined.)

A counselor told me later that, when I walked out on the stage, which was really the floor of the small barn which normally served as our wrestling arena (another sport I hated), he thought I was going to be a flop. It’s likely that most of the other audience members, all sitting on a grassy hill outside the barn looking into its open doors, thought so too. But I knew I had my supporter, my plant, with me in the audience, and, as with the ping-pong tournament, it did not occur to me that I might flop. I knew they would all laugh just as my carpool had, as my cabin mates had. And right from the first joke they started giggling. There were moments when I could hardly keep from laughing myself, probably mostly because I was giddy from all that positive attention, but partly because I was realizing anew that those Steve Martin jokes were pretty damn funny.

Mind you, I was never pretending that these were my jokes. I always said, “These are Steve Martin jokes.”

The next day, at lunch, I was awarded top prize for the talent show, which was a Coke. From the Coke machine. This was the best a camper could hope for in those days, at that camp. If you really did something noteworthy, like crawled under your cabin to get the bubble gum wrappers out (and you weren’t doing that as punishment for something else you had done) or rolled in the mud on a dare from a counselor, then you “got a Coke.”

Okay, that’s my meme in two parts.

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A Meme of Past Glory I

1) In elementary school I was always among the last picked for sports teams at recess. After school, I almost never played pickup sports with other kids. Instead I watched Batman on TV in the afternoons, Bewtiched, the Mickey Mouse club. And I read books. When I would go out, I would ride my bike alone and 2) usually did not really want to run into other kids because, perhaps, I was not socialized very well, and also because other kids were pretty much jerks anyway.


In my mid-elementary school years, 3) my main athletic outlet was playing ping ping-pong with my dad before supper. 4) My mom would be teaching piano lessons in the living room, and Dad would come home from work, come down to the basement, put the news on and play ping ping-pong with me. The ping ping-pong table was next to one of the basement’s white paneled walls, and we declared that banking the ball off this wall was legal, as long as the ball then bounced in the opponent’s court.

I’m trying to remember how this ping-pong playing was dovetailed with my own piano practice when I started lessons in fourth grade. Maybe I played ping-pong with Dad from when he got home after 5pm until Mom finished her last piano student around 6pm. Then she would make supper, and I would take my turn on the piano. We were nothing if not a musical household. Before Mom taught, Dad would be the one on the piano when he got home, playing Ragtime.

Ping-pong was fun, piano was not, but 5) I am known, to this day, to dutifully pursue projects ostensibly to deepen myself, even when I lack honest inspiration. I do this, in fact, sometimes when I should be looking for more work. It’s my tragic flaw, the basic thing that keeps me from truly kicking ass.

Our physical education coach at school was also the new soccer coach at Longwood College of which my elementary school (K-7) was a part as a lab school for training new teachers. We called this phys-ed teacher “Mr. P” because we could not pronounce his eastern European family name. He was from the Northeast and gave us the impression that folks from there all talked kind of tough and preceded every sentence with “’Ey!” as in, “’Ey Joey, quit foolin’ around.” My classmates who lived in Farmville, VA, where all this schooling was taking place, said that they could hear his shouts of “’Ey” wafting up Second Avenue in the afternoons from the soccer practice field.

It seems funny to me that this soccer coach who was hired to whip Longwood’s team into shape (and did so to a significant degree, if I recall correctly) and had a no-nonsense attitude about participation and team building in phys-ed class would start a ping-pong tournament. It was such a sideshow, geeky thing. The matches had to be held at lunchtime or after school, apart from normal phys-ed activities. The ping-pong table would be set up wherever it could be, in the lunchroom or school foyer, whichever was not being used at the time. There was never any ping-pong instruction during P.E.; whatever instruction we had needed to have been already gleaned by our own independent experience in life, which meant that some people were just screwed, and others were uncharacteristically lucky.

The tournament was for fifth, sixth, and seventh graders only. I was in sixth. I think I even was not sure that I wanted to enter the tournament. I was not competitive, I had never played Little League or any other sport, never even been to any of these games as a spectator to watch my classmates play. Some of them were home-run heros who had already perfected their Babe Ruth struts at the age of 11. They were arch-enemys when they faced each other on Friday nights from beneath the brims of their “Rotary,” “Jaycees,” “Moose”hats. They chewed Big League Chew and spat. You know, looking back, 6) I think that the biggest reason I never wanted to do Little League was that I didn’t want to sit on a bench with a bunch of sweaty boys who were spitting. I had never had to do this, and somehow, without ever experiencing it firsthand, I knew to avoid it.

All this athletic engagement was happening to other kids outside my realm of experience, often on Friday nights, when I would be at home watching The Incredible Hulk or whatever. So when I did finally enter my first athletic competition, I was very surprised at the low level of actual competition.

Mr. P was letting folks serve by bouncing the ball first, then tapping it over the net. I could top-spin these suckers back to their court and off to Venus. But I was fairly sensitive for a kid, and in my recollection, I didn’t abuse these opponents too badly.

There was this one serious dickhead “K” in my class who was also in the tournament. He would hit you when the teacher wasn’t looking, and at lunch he would take your yogurt from you. In earlier grades, like first through second grade, he had to wear a cast and brace on a leg that was healing from a nasty break. That took at least a year to heal, but like a dog adapting to loping on three legs, he learned to run with that one leg held rigid in its cast. He would lift it from the hip, heave it forward, slap it rattling to the ground, then sort of jump forward on his good leg. He was about as fast as anyone. He was also known to kick kids with that brace. By sixth grade he had been long healed from that, and he was excellent at all sports, so he was probably really good at ping-pong. I have no memory of playing against him though, so I expect he was beaten in some other bracket by someone else.

The person who beat him was probably severnth grader “T,” whom I played later in a semi-final match one Friday after school. By then the ping-pong tournament had become a big deal. Some players were becoming celebrities in their circles of friends, but I don’t recall much attention being paid to me around the time of that match. In general, 7) I was neither consistently an outsider or insider. For a period of a few days, I could be the object of the cool kids’ teasing; then, other times, I could be on the fringes of the “in” crowd, but then I usually kept my mouth shut, fearing that I would say something that would reveal my quirky outsider interests in sci-fi, books, fantasies.

This match was held in the lunch room after school on a Friday, and maybe 20 or so kids, teachers, a few parents were there to watch. They were mostly, I think, from “T’s” seventh grade class. Some of them even hung or sat in the colorful metal grillwork dividing the lunch room from the hallway bordering it. Normally teachers would immediately yell at anyone doing this, but in my recollection, nobody yelled that afternoon.

I don’t think I realized how good a player “T” was until we had gotten into the match a ways. He was damn good. He was the first opponent to deliberately place the ball certain places to confuse me, and to put spins on it. Early in the match I gave up trying to spin the balls back at him, because his spins combined with my spins were like mixing drugs and alcohol, and nothing good came of it. I ended up just trying to hold on, just return the damn ball, just keep it in play. That was all I could do. Man there were some long volleys too. And it never really occurred to me that I would lose. I mean, he was bigger than me, a seventh grader, probably a better ping-pong player when you get down to it; and he was someone I had heard the girls in my carpool from home to school, “K” and “E,” talking about in the hushed, awestruck tones they were learning about from reading Tiger Beat (remember, I was still watching Batman -- I was certainly not the subject of such conversation). But I had beaten the crap out of everyone that came before me and it just never occurred to me that I could walk away from a match having not won. It’s not that I had to muster all my will, or shut out distractions, or assume the Eye of the Tiger. It was just that I was sweating more, and my ass was against a wall, but that wall was blocking me from losing.

I recall actually running back from the table to catch up to balls going past me. Once I really did dive for a ball and roll on the tile floor, but I certainly lost that point. And in my memory, nobody on the sidelines was saying much -- not much cheering or clapping for either of us. It never occurred to me that they were mostly on “T’s” side, but I think they were. He probably really was expected to win.

My teacher from the previous year, Mrs. “B,” said to my Dad later that “T” just couldn’t get anything past me. I won, and everyone was pretty quiet about it, and our parents drove us home. I think maybe it was while going home that it first occurred to me that, “Jesus, that was a ball buster,” though I hardly had such descriptive language at my disposal at the time.

The final was to to be a few school days later, maybe middle of the next week. I was really uptight about it. The other finalist was “Th,” a fifth grader, a very short guy for his age who had an extremely sunny personality, whom everyone liked, who I don’t think was really teased much at all despite his shortness.

After “T”had been such a hard match, I figured it stood to reason that “Th” would be harder, so I made my Dad practice with me far more than he wanted to. He said, “Okay, but you’ll have to do the same for Sidletz.” 8) “Sidletz” (spelling?) was his word for the male child he presumed I would have someday. (Dad came from middle-income Cleveland, and whenever he needed a name for a generic person, someone I might call “Joe Six-Pack,” his name for such a person came out sounding German or Eastern European, like “Frankie Schnitzelhauser.”) I think that prerequisite to this presumption was another presumption, which was that I would date more as a young adult. Well, all I can say to Dad is, we learn to relate on emotional levels by following our parents’ example.

The final was to be held during the school day, with the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades taking their recess periods at the same time so they could all watch. The day started pretty normally, with us sixth graders coming in to our colorful room, hanging out among our desks before class was to start, taking our seats at the bell. The teacher was trying to start class when “J,” who tended to blut things out without forewarning, said, “Hey, today’s the championship!”

This had been the only thing on my mind that day. 9) Like so many things things that preoccupied me then and now, it was weighing heavily in my chest, and I had kept quiet about it. Bearing that emotional burden, I was suddenly also in the unusual position of having all eyes on me. And they were chanting my three letter, one syllable name like Eastern Bloc sports fans cheering a figure skater. The teacher motioned for them to stop, then quickly gave up and smiled and let it go on for maybe 30 seconds. And then our class finally calmed down, and in the relative quiet, we could hear the fifth graders through the wall chanting “Th’s” name.

The clowns in our class would not be outdone. “Let’s pick him up,” they said, and came at me, and I was sort of in shock, maybe a milder version of how I was 20 years later when 10) I was held up at gunpoint.

My chair was lifted with me in it. I knew this would be awkward, and an instant later, the mob realized this as well and separated me from the chair. I kind of wiggled to get away, and I was probably smiling by now. “W,” a huge guy who had been held back a grade, came up behind me and lifted me, and others joined him to carry me out into the hallway. Fifth graders heard the commotion, saw us, and went back to their room to carry “Th” as well. I was carried maybe only 50 feet or so down the hall, then set down, and we all went back to class and took our seats, flushed, as if coming back from recess.

“What would we do if [Elrond] were up against ‘K,’” one of the athletic boys said. He was referring to the dick who had once had the broken leg. “K” was slouched in his seat though, doing something in his lap, maybe playing one of those pocket video games. He looked up, looked back at the game. He had been out of the tournament for a while and had no interest in it.

I knew what they would have done if it were me against “K” in the finals. The louder, athletic kids would have favored him, and some quieter ones would have supported me. Our class would have been divided. Aware of this sectarian split, there would not have been much pre-game cheering for either of us, but the athletic boys would have slapped Hi-Fives with “K” behind the divider leading to the sink and coat closet area, and I might have come around the corner to find them leaning against the counter there. I would have stopped, sensing I was not welcome, and they would have pushed past me, punching my shoulder as they went by, not punching very hard, but enough to possibly 11) make me cry depending on my emotional makeup of the moment.

From the first volley, I found “Th” to be no match for me. I could not believe he had made it to the finals. As expression of my disbelief, I smashed a few of his lousy serves into the corners of his court, then restrained myself to winning the rest of the points without fanfare.

Afterwards, back in class, “E” the Tiger Beat reader, who happened to have a seat next to me, something I found rather thrilling even that year, was kind of cold toward me for a while. Then she said, “Gah, you didn’t have to kill him. You could have let him get a few points.”

I had some sinister reaction I could not voice, but now, in adulthood, I can. It is, “’K’ got to kick kids with his leg brace and take our yogurt from us. ‘J’ gets to disrupt class whenever he wants. Other ‘J’ gets to come into the room on Monday morning and hold his hands in the air, making peace signs, because of his home runs he hit the previous Friday. ‘T’ gets the girls talking about him in hushed tones. But I don’t get to kick someone’s ass in ping-pong? Well tough shit. I kicked it. But don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll go back to being mostly inconsequential now. I won’t be any more trouble to your sense of justice."

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How to Talk to a Neoconservative (If You Must)

You are washing dishes at the kitchen sink with your step-mother “J” next to you. From the dining room, you hear the first two anti-terrorism propositions related in the previous post, and you get pissed.

You know that “J” does not like political discussions in the family. Once, in the past, you had a raging argument with your father in her presence, and later she told you it was not good for his blood pressure. But another time, Christmas Eve of 2005 to be exact, you stayed up until 3 AM talking to her about why we went to war in Iraq. She had just read America’s Secret War by George Friedman, and her favorite reason for the war was his assessment, in chapter 11, that the source of al Qaeda’s sentiment and funding was really Saudi Arabia, but that we could not attack that country directly and also could not count on it to police al Qaeda itself. So, we needed to stage a victory against some Arab country to show our strength and persuade Saudi Arabia to come back into strong alliance with us.

It would be interesting to know how she feels about this now. While we may have wanted Saudi Arabia to fear our military might and our “freedom,” what they may actually fear is our ability to iraquidate a country, plunge it into chaos that neither we nor it can control. In Iraq we have been like a little kid playing a board game who sees no better option than to upset the board and scatter the pieces.

Of all your parents (two step-, two biological), you feel closest to “J.” She may harbor basic conservative values about God, family, and country, but you know from the fact that she likes all the short story collections you buy for her for Christmas that she understands irony, can accept ambiguity, does not cling to dogma. And she has been relatively silent about U.S. relations in the Middle East lately. You think that maybe she agrees with you more on some issues now, maybe understands your suspicion from the moment our tanks rolled into Iraq that the U.S. does not know what it is doing. But she will not take your side vocally either, because of your father’s blood pressure and whatnot. So you think, standing next to her at the sink, that she does not want you to get involved in the conversation in the next room. But then you hear from the next room the third ridiculous neocon proposal for fixing the Middle East described in the previous post, and you leave the sink and go in.

Step-sister-in-law “E” is running her rant about how we should give safe haven to the women of Iraq, for surely they want the education we would provide to enable them to take control of their own lives. You interrupt. You tell her this sounds like the past neocon scheme hatched in the late ‘90’s to invade southern Shiite Iraq, protect the Shiites from Saddam, let them start the democracy that neocons were certain they would start. Such an arrangement, according to neocons, would be devastating to Saddam’s regime.

“E” puts her hand on your forearm and gives you, surprisingly, an understanding look. She knows how you disagree with her. Three summers ago you said that our country had been hoodwinked into supporting this war, and she said the WMD issue was “academic,” that an evil dictator had been ousted, that she could not count on Democrats to defend her family. Two summers ago she had said that we had to spread self determinism in the Middle East, that it was the only way to protect ourselves, that we were doing it for them, but really we were doing it for ourselves. One summer ago (when she was reading some collection of writings of St. Thomas Aquinas) she said, out of nowhere, that she would not talk about politics.

This summer she is reading A Christian Manifesto and is apparently willing to talk about politics again.

You tell her all neocon expectations for the Iraq war were based on presumptions. Neocons presumed that Iraqi Shiites were ready to start a democracy. Some presumed that if they open up Iraq as a completely free market, that the country would blossom as an example for the rest of the world. But also, you say, some neocons presumed that Iraqi Shiites would accept the Jordanian monarchy as their rule (not a democracy!) as stated by David Wurmser in an essay called “Clean Break” excerpted here at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Still other neocons wanted to install Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi National Congress as the new government. For information on this, see George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate chapters 3 and 4, or Juan Cole here. Both sources do not give any outright quotes from anyone saying the wanted to install Chalabi and the exiles, but there is strong evidence implying that this is true.

You’ve raised your voice at “E.” Tell her that, with respect to each of the neocon presumptions, the invasion of Iraq has had the opposite of the desired effect. Tell her that concurrently to our military involvement in Iraq, that country has become one of the biggest incubators of terrorism the world has ever known. If she wants to continue espousing neocon ideology, it would behoove her to explain what we can do from here forward to reverse this awful trend of increasing terrorism.

She says that we have to stick with it, that we can’t expect positive results so soon. Ask her if she believed Rumsfeld when he said we would be out in 6 months.

“Did he say that?” she says.

And did she believe Wolfowitz when he said we could do it with 150,000 troops?

She looks away. “I didn’t know that.”

Ask her what planet she has been living on. Tell her that, continuing the parade of neocon presumptions, William Kristol and Robert Kagan are now presuming that the turning against al Qaeda by moderate Sunni tribes is a sign that things are going well. Note that, while these genius writers had once cast their lot with Iraqi Shiites, now it is with Sunnis. Ask her what happened the last time the U.S. supported Sunni tribes against a common enemy.

She doesn’t know.

Tell her those were the precursors of al Qaeda. (Read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.)

Tell her you read at least one article per week in The Weekly Standard and The National Review. Ask her if she reads anything outside the conservative media, and she admits she does not.

She starts on the comparison to the American Revolution. “I believe that every human ultimately wants self determinism,” she says. “I believe that democracy is what all people are striving for.”

Tell her you are not an expert on the American Revolution, but ask her if, before we started that war, our thirteen colonial governments were not pretty much running things for themselves. Ask her if it would have worked for France to invade the American colonies, kick England out, and then continue to occupy us and guide us to forming a democracy.

“No, that would not have worked,” she says.

Tell her that before we invaded Iraq, George Packer wrote a New York Times article called Dreaming of Democracy (free account required) which contained the following paragraph:

The chances of democracy succeeding even in Iraq under American occupation are highly questionable, [Thomas] Carothers [of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] argues. War seldom creates democracy; according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, of the 18 regime changes forced by the United States in the 20th century, only 5 resulted in democracy, and in the case of wars fought unilaterally, the number goes down to one -- Panama. Democracy takes root from within, over a long period of time, in conditions that have never prevailed in Iraq. For democracy to have a chance there would require a lengthy and careful American commitment to nation-building -- which could easily look to Iraqis and other Arabs like colonialism. Nor can we be sure that democracy, in Iraq or elsewhere, will lead to pro-American regimes; it might lead to the opposite. ''The idea that there's a small democracy inside every society waiting to be released just isn't true,'' Carothers says. ''If we're pinning our hopes on the idea that this will lead to a democratic change throughout the region, then we're invading for the wrong reason.'' Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment, adds, '''We've suffered so much that the only alternative is democracy' -- as soon as you say it, you realize there's a mile between the beginning and end of that sentence.''

“E” starts on her World War II analogy: we have to fight, we can’t let totalitarianism remain as a threat to us.

Ask her what WWII had that the Iraq war does not have. Tell her it was post war reconstruction. This was why Germany and Japan did not continue to wage war against their neighbors after WWII. This was what has been sorely lacking in the Iraq war.

“Then that’s the State Department’s fault,” she says, and you cut her off. No. The Pentagon suppressed State Department planning for post-war Iraq because it felt that such planning would delay our invasion. (Read The Assassin’s Gate chapters 3 and 4.)

The beach house has been vacated; all other family members are out on the beach. “E” wants to go out there too, so you both go, and while walking along the boardwalk over the barrier dune, she says “Look, I know Rumsfeld was an arrogant jerk.”

Tell her you are very sorry that the Bush administration has screwed up her dreams for a new Middle East. Remind her that at any time, Rumsfeld could have been fired by a discerning president.

“J” walks past you quickly while you are saying this, does not speak to you. You’ve been wondering if she will ask you to stop, but she does not.

Out on the beach, the kids and adults are waving flashlights around or venturing into the darkness to look for crabs. Tell “E” that you hope our country has learned something from our experience in Iraq: that if we invade a country and oust its government, then that whole country becomes our problem; that we can not predict the outcome of an invasion, particularly if we don’t make a very earnest and well-informed investment in the well-being of the people we intend to liberate; that regardless of how much we love freedom and democracy, we can not control how a population will vote, and it is the pseudo democracies of Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinians that are causing more trouble than the entrenched dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Tell her that next time she wants to “help” the people of a country, she needs to first learn all she can about those people, and not just assume that some “Thomas Jefferson” will arise in their midst and steer them toward becoming like us.

You hope, in light of all this, that she does not want to invade Iran.

“No, I don’t want to invade Iran,” she says. “That would be stupid. But we should bomb Damascus into glass,” she says.

WTF? “I can’t believe you said that,” you say. “That is evil.”

She takes it back. “But Syria is totally useless,” she says.

Tell her that Syria is a big “middle manager” in all this. They are not a source of fundamentalism, nor of oil. Their “president” is secular, a former ophthalmologist working in Paris who was called home by his father to succeed him. (All this comes from George Friedman’s America’s Secret War chapter 11.) Syria has its interest in Lebanon, and it has an interest in making money, and it probably enjoys seeing us bogged down in Iraq. Syria is not to be trusted, but should be talked to, because talking is cheaper than fighting, and anyway, as I said, hasn’t our experience in Iraq taught us something about fighting? And mostly, throughout the whole Middle East, people are just trying to live their lives -- make bread, wash clothes, keep a job, raise food, raise kids. A nuclear attack on some population because of it’s dumbass government would be a despicable act and would surely earn us more enemies than it would kill, would kill far more than just our enemies, and earn us the increased distrust of what allies we have left now. Even William Kristol has described himself (to Stephen Colbert) as a no-nuke-neocon.

“E’s” husband “M” comes over. He is holding her toddler son who, “M” says, has been looking for her. “E” turns her attention to him, and you tell her thanks for talking, tell her to read Informed Comment, which she says she will.

You don’t think she will. She will run across his occasional emotionally charged Bush-bashing, and she will write him off as a crazy liberal.

While this discussion has been going heatedly, the rest of the family has been on the fringes, minding its own business -- finishing the dishes, getting the kids ready to go out to the beach, crabbing. None of their comments from political discussions of past summers entered this one -- not the plea “There have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11” as a justification for the Iraq war; not your father’s mantra, “We have to kill them all. Innocent people will die, but that is the way it has been for thousands of years”; not “We have to fight them at the source,” which everyone knows is not what we are doing.

Back in the beach house later, only your father and "J” are in the living room, working a puzzle. You are in the upstairs loft which overlooks the living room when they ask “E” how the discussion went. She says, “Your son is very engaging and well informed,” and you wonder if she knows you are listening.

The thing about neocons is, they want to keep the discussion in the abstract. That is where ideology lies. So, hit them with specifics that they can’t address. And see if they do address it. Give them a chance and listen, ‘cause you might learn something. But be prepared to blow apart the usual comparisons to WWII and the American Revolution, and remember to identify their presumptions as just that, and remind them of how their past presumptions have turned out to be invalid. If all they know comes from Rupert Murdoch outlets (“The Weekly Standard” and “Fox News”) then you’ve got them right where you want them.

Here’s another pro-war mantra that didn’t come up in this discussion. “We can’t cut and run.” Your repsonse for this is, “We can’t keep pretending a generation four war is a generation three war.” This will likely stymie them if they have not read Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and the Stone, a discussion of why insurgents, from communists in China and Vietnam to the Sandinistas to the Iraqis, have been fought ineffectively by superior military powers. I have not finished it yet, but I look forward to posting on it soon.

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Fresh Ideas from Family Beach Week for the Middle East

Step-brother-in-law “R” retold some story about nuclear war that he had gotten somewhere. Do any of you know where this came from? Some movie or short story?

“R” said that in the story, the president is out speaking in some town in America. News comes in of a nuclear missile launch against us from the Middle East. The president and his entourage order retaliatory strikes against the locations that have attacked us; then they leave the town for the safety of the countryside. They find some country restaurant and make that their base of operations. Americans in the restaurant have already seen news of both missile launches on TV, and they are understandably worried. The president tells them everything will be okay. The missiles launched at us, and ours launched in retaliation, are shown as computer graphics on the TV so everyone can watch. American cities are shown to be blown up in computer graphics. The same goes for locations in the Middle East from which the missiles came. Everyone in the restaurant is dismayed except for the president, who tells them again that everything is okay.

Then live video feeds start coming in from the American cities that had been shown to be destroyed. They are unharmed. The missiles launched at us had been duds. But ours launched at the Middle East were real, and those places that launched duds at us are destroyed.

We had made those duds and pretended to lose them in the Middle East to see who would use them against us.

“R” related this story in complete earnestness.

“Oh yeah,” said step-brother “M.” “Just rig a bunch of explosives to blow up when they are being made into IED’s, and let them fall into terrorists’ hands.”

Step-sister-in-law “E” said, “We need to educate their women.” She said their women are sick and tired of being beaten and held back by their husbands. We need to round them up and put them in a safe place, and teach them how to run their own businesses. That would be the thing to do next to begin transforming the Middle East. “’Islam’ means ‘submission,’” she said, smacking one hand into the other. “We should bomb them and educate their women.”

I swear I’m not making this up.

June 28 addendum: Oh, and I forgot to mention, before all this happened, they had the Chronicles of Narnia showing on DVD for the kids. I watched it too because I had not seen it yet, and I had loved the books as a child. While watching, the daughter of aforementioned "E," who, I must mention, is named "Jordan" after a Middle Eastern country, exclaimed, "Aslan is like Jesus except that Jesus was resurrected after three days, and Aslan was resurrected after one day." Her father, aforementioned "M," said, "That's right Honey."

Speaking of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I give it the same assessment I give David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic Dune. Both have great acting and begin with a rich portrayal of the story. In the case of Dune, much of the richness lies in the production design; in Lion, it is in the wonderful casting and performances of the four kids and all the talking animals, the quick and clear building of the story (because, after all, you have to keep kids' attention), the sinister feel of Narnia in winter, the amazing performance of Tilda Swinton as the evil witch. But both movies lose their richness two-thirds of the way through and degenerate into buildup to war and clash between armies. Important events near the end are subsumed by action sequences, and despite these movies' initial nourishment, the sensitive viewer is left with a feeling of having eaten too much cotton candy.

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A Labyrinth Walkthrough

Hints! Cheats! Spoilers à la a Baldur’s Gate walkthrough!

You can’t fool a old D&D player. With magic items, mythological creatures, and simplified portrayals of innocence and evil, Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie that should have been an adventure game.

Our heroine is a girl about 10 years old who loves fantasy books. This is appropriate, because it predisposes her to have an interest in the supernatural. If she were some geeky chess club kid, then she would have more interest in putting the king of the underworld in “checkmate” than in finding his silly artifacts for him, and then you just wouldn’t any adventure at all.

À la any computer fantasy adventure game, she finds the one rock in the dirt road that is actually a stone eye. She searches the area until she finds the stone statue missing its eye, and voilà! She puts the eye in the statue, and the praying mantis appears.

Her new stepfather, a general in Franco’s army, is evil. No question about this. He clearly states that the rebels in the woods are mistaken for believing that all people are created to be equal. He also states that his new wife, our heroine’s mother, sick and pregnant with the general’s child, should be killed if the choice ever arises whether to save her or the baby.

The praying mantis visits our heroine one night and turns into a fairy à la Peter Pan. Because life in her new stepdad’s military outpost is a bummer, she follows the fairy into the nearby labyrinth, meets the faun à la The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and is told that she needs to awaken the king of the underworld. Her first step in this process will be a to kill a giant frog à la any first-level Dungeons and Dragons adventure, and get the golden key.

The next day she ventures into the forest to kill the giant frog. One might say this is kind of a dull monster for her to have to kill, but remember, she’s only first level at this point. She is not ready for the fire-breathing dragons, misleading displacer beasts, and mind-frying mind flayers that one faces at higher levels.

She kills the frog, watches its transformation into a pile of gelatinous slime, and sees, in the midst of the slime, the golden key! She retrieves it and heads home. But she has gotten her new dress muddy, so when her mother sees her, she is put to bed with no supper.

That night the faun visits and compliments her on her success. Now he gives her a new mission: venture into a strange crypt and use the key to unlock a door and get the dagger hidden there. There are two stipulations: she will only have a limited time to spend in the crypt, and she must not eat anything she finds there à la Persephone, who might have been rescued by Zeus from her imprisonment by Hades, except for the fact that she had eaten pomegranates while in the underworld and, thus, by mythological standards, had cooked her goose. What happened to Persephone then had great bearing on the world, for it was the reason we have warm growing seasons and cold winters. However, this little quest for our heroine in Labyrinth did not reach this caliber by a long shot.

To help our heroine accomplish her task, she is given some chalk, a little case with more fairies in it, and an hour glass which would keep her aware of the limited amount of time she will have.

With the chalk she draws a door in the wall, which she opens. She sets up the hour glass there in the doorway and leaves it. How this will keep her aware of passing time when she passes out of sight of it I do not know, but this is what she does. She goes down the hall and finds a room with a motionless, eyeless, naked dude at one end of a banquet table spread with an enormous feast. Pale and blind, the eyeless dude resembles Voldo from Nintendo’s Soul Caliber, but most folks watching this movie will not realize this, which is why I’m here. On a plate in front of the eyeless dude are his two eyes.

Our heroine finds the secret door and uses the key to open it. Inside is the dagger she has been sent to find. Now she can go. We know the hourglass, way back down the hall, is running. She has been told not to mess with the food on the table, and who knows what’s up with this eyeless dude at the end of the table. I mean, you would think you would not want to hang around and risk waking him up. Certainly that would not be good.

But she has been to bed without supper, see! Here we have the first tie-in between her real-world life involving a general in Franco’s army, and the fantasy world. So she can’t keep herself from eating a grape off the table.

This causes Voldo to wake up. Well, duh. He drags his gross, long, black fingernails across the table. He picks up his eyeballs and puts them in their sockets, which are not on his face but in the palms of his hands. This makes squishy noises. He scoots his chair back and stands up. But our heroine hears none of this because, I presume, her chewing of the grape is so loud. I don’t know. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt here. Voldo starts lurching up behind her à la Michael in Halloween, and gets mighty close before she finally hears something and sees him. Then he eats the heads off two fairies à la Ozzy Osbourne. Our heroine gets the idea that she should get out of there, and she does.

She runs down the hall, and look, the hourglass is about to run out! The door starts closing! It does close, and Voldo is getting closer! But he’s slow because he’s been sitting still for so long and he’s stiff, and it’s kind of hard for him to see anyway with his eyes in his hands. So she has time to get a chair, stand on it, draw another door in the ceiling and push it open and climb out. But of course, there is that tense moment when her feet are still dangling in the hallway below and Voldo almost grabs them (risking putting his eyes out?) before she climbs through all the way. Whew.

That Voldo guy was a freakier than I would expect someone at her low level to have to deal with. Hmm. That giant frog must have been worth more experience points than I thought. Or maybe there were quest points beyond the basic giant frog XP value.

Well, she has screwed up by eating from the table, and the faun lets her know, and it looks like no more underworld for her -- she’ll have to make do with lousy reality. The audience is never told why it was bad news to wake Voldo -- this is just how it is and we are to accept it and shut up. This is war, people, and you can’t question authority in a time or war. Meanwhile, the stepfather is torturing people and killing rebels and her mother is growing more and more sick. The mother dies in childbirth, and without her serving as our heroine’s voucher in the general’s manor, reality-life for our heroine becomes ever more lousy.

Thank goodness the underworld comes calling again. Providing no philosophical basis, the faun announces she has been given a second chance: go get her baby brother, who is sleeping in a cradle in the general’s quarters, and bring him to the center of the labyrinth. Oooh, okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

Outside, the rebels are attacking. Inside, the general is giving himself stitches after being injured in an unexpected reversal of a torture session of the maid which was, in fact, the best scene of the movie but has little relevance in this walkthrough. The newborn baby is behind the general. Our heroine sneaks through the general’s room toward the baby, pausing to drip some poison in the general’s drink.

The general’s men come to the door to inform him that things are going poorly against the rebels. The general goes to get his clothes, and by the light of one explosion sees, in the doorway, our heroine with the baby swaddled in her arms.

This is the coolest moment in the movie. We get the idea that the general has never really looked at her, his stepdaughter, until now, when she is appearing otherworldly in silhouette, an agent of the underworld, one in a long line of mythological baby-snatchers, from Rumpelstiltskin to Merlin. And, for the first time, she is not afraid of the general. After all, she is between him and the door, and she has his child. He goes after her and she bolts for the labyrinth à la The Shining.

The general is made woozy by the poison so he follows her with a loping gait into the labyrinth à la Jack Nicholson. Honestly, do the filmmakers think we have not lived before standing in line for their movie? Our heroine dodges through the turns and, like the boy in Stephen King’s classic, ends up at a dead end. But she does not need to be smart like King’s heroine and backtrack in her own footprints. Instead, the walls of the labyrinth part à la the Dead Sea and admit her directly to the labyrinth’s center and close behind her just as the general arrives at the dead end.

In the center of the labyrinth, the faun tells our heroine she must draw the blood of an innocent to finally awaken the king of the underworld. This is what the knife she had obtained earlier is for. This is what the baby is for. This is what it all comes down to. Being a good girl, she hesitates to stab her baby brother. Then the general reaches the labyrinth’s center and produces the blood of an innocent in a different way.

For a while it seems that she has escaped to the court of the king of the underworld. The king is her father, and the queen is her mother, and the three are reunited as a proper family unit at last. While our heroine’s parents were not separated by divorce, I was reminded how strange it can be in this modern world to think of our parents, long parted in too many cases, as being together again. Even if their marriage was a lousy one, it was, in our child’s eyes, a basic element of definition for our existence. And for our parents, their union, at one time, was worthy of a big to-do, with a wedding and a dress and a cake and all that. And they had thought their union worthy of supporting children. Then things happened and our parents are together no more, but isn’t it interesting to think that maybe they could have stayed together, if they had not been so proud, or paranoid, or could have really listened for a change? That now, in middle adult life, we might have still had these two parents, turning to look at each other as we stood in the middle of the living room telling them of some life decision we may have made -- a plan to move, to change careers, to run off to Africa with a lover? Is it a dream that, years ago with cheeks red with embarrassment, we stood in front of them and had to explain what we were doing over at the post office that made Ms. Wells call the police? That they managed to share a stupid joke every now and then, and that one of them would turn to us and see if we got it, as if it were hard to get and not merely a rare instance of levity in a life of sighs and coping? There is a chance that we could have not had our ears and brains filled with all those arguments, and we might have not had to spend our lives with this lump of sadness riding around in our breasts no matter how sunny a vacation we manage to take, or how hard we find ourselves working.

But our heroine's family reunion is just a final escapist fantasy à la Brazil. A dictator has taken over Spain, and though the rebels have won the day, they will have to endure decades under totalitarian rule. A tour of the underworld would be a brighter prospect, but despite the dripping blood of an innocent, no fairy king appears.

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