Idle Thought of the Evening to Cheer You Up

If that old photo of me on the board with that cute man riding the waves doesn't cheer you up, then maybe this idle thought that I just had as I lay on Sophie's bed in her room will. I know everyone is feeling incredibly glum. Nervous, Anxious. Nauseous. Filled with anger. Overflowing with lassitude. A deep sense of futility.

I'll remind you, though, of that time Bush won the presidential election the second time.

Remember that? Remember that morning, especially those of you in Los Angeles who walked into the preschool parking lot with me and had to look at the folks who'd been sporting big Ws on their Range Rovers?

Remember how you felt?

Do you feel worse now or better?

I'm feeling so much better that I hauled my old doddering ass off of Sophie's bed, scanned that old photo of myself on the surfboard with the cute man riding the waves and typed out this post.

Come on! Don't you feel a bit better?

Just wondering

So, I listened to the POTUS this morning while sitting in my car in my driveway. He was speaking at a press conference about those starving prisoners of Guantanamo and what to do, what to do. I don't really understand why this is such a problem for some -- the holding of hundreds of men prisoner in a dank place somewhere in Cuba without charging them with a crime for years and years and years -- and then I know why this is a problem. It's because we live in a country where it's more like do as I say than do as I do, a country where torture became legal and basic rights of due process were suspended because you don't mess with the United States, where even the most reasonable of the conservative justified crimes of war, absolving them and those who perpetrated them -- look, how cute the last POTUS looks with his new grandbaby! -- where those in power, backed by the inane, let drop the most basic of gun control objectives in the name of our Second Amendment rights and where, I'd say, fear rules the day. What if the Chechnyian American boy and his brother had opened fire at the Boston Marathon with machine guns legally obtained and killed scores of people that morning instead of packing pressure cookers with nails and metal and then setting them off as bombs? Would they have been charged with owning Weapons of Mass Destruction?  Would the entire city of Boston been shut down as the  National Guard roamed the streets searching for the killers? Would the NRA have come out and said People kill people, not guns! And would the politicians and the people that prop them up have bemoaned the lack of proper mental health treatment in this country in lieu of just removing or making more difficult the ability to buy and use Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Just wondering.

Alice, Mystery, Wonderland

It is to Alice’s credit that she doesn't hesitate for a moment to discard her preconceptions when she comes across situations that patently refute them. In doing so, she displays an admirable readiness to encounter reality on its own terms, a receptive cast of mind that many philosophers would include among the most important “intellectual virtues” or character traits that assist in the discovery of truth.

George Dunn and Brian McDonald in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

via Brain Pickings 

 

I don't know what the hell was wrong with me yesterday that I felt so upset the entire day. I happened to read a bit more about the high school football rapists in some godforsaken town in this country and I also listened to some economists talk about the cost of the Iraq war -- not just in dollars but in lives lost, both Iraqis and Americans. I heard Terri Gross interview someone talking about the toll of that war and the one in Afghanistan on literally hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and how that toll will be tolling for decades and decades. I briefly thought about George W. Bush whacking weeds on his ranch in Texas and Dick Cheney exulting with no regrets at the evil he wrought. I wished that they, like the two young football players who raped a drunk sixteen year old girl could sit in a jail cell with regret imposed on them like a pall. If I were an evangelical, I'd pray for the soul of America which seems, on some days, to have been swallowed up and spit back out in the form of people fighting for their right to protect themselves with assault weapons. I don't know what the hell was wrong with me yesterday other than that, the news. I took a walk in my neighborhood by the purple lavender bush scraggly on the Orthodox lawn. I ran my hand over the papery pink bougainvillea draped over a chain link fence and squinted my eyes at a Louisiana sheriff's car parked alone. The encyclopedia I carry with me told me that vampires could very possibly be in that house behind the car. I might have eaten a dark-capped fungus and shrunk to a size commensurate with a long tunnel, the dark a mystery, light at the end.

Veteran's Day and Vonnegut

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

That's one of my favorite quotes of Kurt Vonnegut, whose birthday was yesterday, November 11th. He died in 2007 and thus never saw the inauguration of Obama, never mind the second, but he was notorious for his vocal hatred of all things related to war and particularly despised Bush for invading Iraq. I've read nearly everything Vonnegut wrote and like Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5 the best of all his books, but I love reading about him, too. A friend once told me that she passed him on the street in New York City when he was quite old, and she was struck by his big white-haired head and by the way he nodded it in greeting. This morning, I read a terrific interview with his daughter Nanette who has written the introduction to the newly released We Are What We Pretend to Be: The First and Last Works, which spans the beginning and end of Vonnegut's fifty-year career. Here's an excerpt, but you might want to read the whole thing on The Rumpus:

Rumpus: He never talked about his experiences in World War II with your mom?

Vonnegut: No. And he was a textbook PTSD sufferer. It’s only recently that veterans are encouraged to talk, let alone cry. My dad could be triggered by something like watching the news coverage of the Vietnam War. Both he and my mother were tuned in to what a load of crap it was. I remember him ripshit yelling at the TV saying, “Fucking lies!” I’ll never forget that. My mother was red-faced, saying, “They’re not going to take my boys. They’re not.”

My father was remembering what it was like and he knew: these are a batch of babies going off to war for nothing. There was a reviewer, William Deresiewicz, who writes for The Nation. He said Slaughterhouse-Five is not a book about flying saucers; it’s a book about post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's the day after Veteran's Day, and my kids are off from school. I'm going to do some laundry and other housekeeping things, perhaps knit a bit more of my sweater, take Sophie out and about in the sunshine and maybe delve, again, into Slaughterhouse 5. I'm going to feel grateful that I can do all of these things, freely, because of people like Vonnegut whose literal fighting as a soldier is only a small part of what he contributed to humanity.

Interesting words from a man whose words are usually over my head

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. 'Bleeding the U.S.,' in his words." The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” -- particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.


from Noam Chomsky's reflections on Osama Bin Laden and the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Was There An Alternative?

Get me out of here

I am stuck in the Washington Dulles airport for four hours. The name of the above pictured store is AMERICA and is staffed by a polite, young Indian man. I think I'm going to have to assuage my anxiety with a Wetzel Pretzel dog. Then I'll finish the Michelle Bachmann article I'm reading in the New Yorker over drinks in the airport bar. Multiple ones.