GV

I’ve been reading Gore Vidal's review of a memoir by John Updike. Gore -- may I call him Gore? -- marshals in full his heroic capacity for sarcasm as he proceeds to deconstruct Updike the man. I’d been waiting for Gore to die -- being the last of that coterie of mid-century luminous literati that danced so enthusiastically before a celebrity-adoring public. (You see, Young Reader, there was once a time (before reality tv, before talkshows had been utterly taken over by comedian hosts chatting solely to actors (mostly B-list starlets)) when actual conversation counted as entertainment.) Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, were the Kardashians and Huni Bubus of that lost age, only, possessing talent. Dead dead dead, now, all gone, but lamented only in the way that cellphones are enjoyed … because that’s how progress precedes.

 And I was wondering, reading Gore’s snide, unfair critique of Updike, how might the latter have responded. We cannot diminish it, dismiss it as an attempt at wit, because it is witty. For all that his stylishly framed tropes are oddly (not surprisingly, not distressingly) superficial, yet Vidal (‘Gore’ has become grating) was talented. But the word talent sets up a clangorous resonance with the parable of the talents. What is to be made of the man of talent, who wastes it? Not wasted in terms of productivity, for Gore Vidal, GV, was prolific.

I just don’t know if it is fair to judge a man for his unwisedom, as GV was, a deep, profoundly deep leftist. Maybe it’s an inherent trait in some people, the marrow of their souls, that no lesson of reality gentle or harsh can ever expunge. We judge a man first for his actions, then for his influence, and only
last for his delusions. Be that as it may, what we have here is a put-down artiste, never comfortable with the burly candor of the men’s locker room, save as a homosexual, but in full-throated glory in the epicene’s salon.

 And it was in reading Vidal’s essay on Nabokov’s Lolita that I decided never to read Lolita. The movie, parts of which I have seen, never engaged me. The book, reports suggest, is on a par with Naked Lunch, which long ago once found itself airborne between my hand and the wastepaper basket. Filth, trash -- not quite le mot juste. The nightly and years-long rape of a pubescent and later nubile girl as a morif just doesn’t grip me, for all the elegance of style or pathos of theme. Tsk tsk, ain’t it a shame, now let’s think about her clitoris some more.

Someone Wednesday had a big grin on his face 

because I was interacting with a lovely young woman. Seems I am suspected of heterosexual intentions. It’s almost a source of grief, and certainly one of unrest, how alienated I am from an adult expression, unleashing, of my libido. Who let the dogs out. This one was too young in any event -- not Lolita young, my son’s age -- and I do have a sense of decorum … unless I’m tempted, and that’s unlikely to happen when I’m in the capacity I was then occupying. But she was lovely, maybe a seven on a good day, and I’m quite charming, and I could not help but notice, and I’m good at ignoring, her smooth as cream breasts. Sort of noticeable. Which occasionally gets me to thinking what it must be like to be a woman, with such an obvious and inconvenient, um, badge of sexuality.

 I’m glad I’m not a woman. I simply wouldn’t know what to do with, um, my, uh, breasts. I mean, they’re just there, and you can’t hide them in shame, and it’s not polite or fair to flaunt them. But maybe it is. Not my problem though. Having a dick is difficult enough. And don’t get me started on balls. Always in the way, and I think my scrotum is getting baggier. I’m finding my underwear isn’t providing as much support as in the past. An elastic issue? I do hold on to them for a long time -- I'm referring to my underwear, and I want a pair that lifts and separates.  Somebody should market that idea.

 I know I’m wrong, but I consider it rude and unethical to impose my sexuality on someone I don’t know extremely well. As my first marriage informed me, it is an imposition. I wish I were normal. Cuz from what I’ve seen from the internet, I have an exceptionally nice penis and any woman would be lucky to enjoy it with me for a while. Maybe I should write a novel about that. Give me some feedback and we’ll take it from there. I’ve already got some potential titles: The Night and the Pillar, An American Cream, In Hot Blood ... it’s too easy. I’d do for middle aged horndogs what Nabokov did for incestuous pedophiles.

 Ho hum. Now you might suppose that the use of my own talent also is not entirely beyond a susceptibility to criticism. It may be you harbor the suspicion that I am not utilizing my gifts in a way fully consistent with my artistic and intellectual possibilities. To this I must agree, and add a lament as well for my untapped and seminal potential -- like deepsea drilling, like the Keystone Pipeline, like fracking. Why are liberals so against heterosexual missionary-position sex? But we are the way we are, until we’re some other way. It’s in the bones, which twist with disease, break with trauma, and grow with health until they harden.

 You’d think I’m too smart to be so unwise. But that’s what this whole post has been about. Meanwhile, don’t worry about me. If anything were a real problem, I wouldn’t talk about it.

This is what I did on Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family.


J

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is dead. Found "not breathing" in his LA rental, CPR administered by EMTs, pronounced dead at UCLA Med Cent. Well. That's odd. He was my age, older by some months, 50. His life was not a bigger trainwreck than mine, but it was public and dramatic.

He was one of the most talented entertainers I've ever seen. Not really my taste, but you have to acknowledge ability. I first noticed it when he sang Blame It on the Boogie, at sec 1:24. For what it is, it's perfect. You'll notice the skill is the same as several years later, when he became the biggest thing since Elvis. Frank Sinatra in 1940, Elvis in 1960, Jackson in 1980, and Eminem in 2000. The seminal geniuses of their generations, although Eminem quit too soon to really count.

Jackson changed his face to look like Peter Pan. He courted notoriety, at the start, deliberately. The hyperbaric chamber in which he slept, as in a coffin -- he allowed those pictures to be leaked. The chimp. The bones of the Elephant Man. The single glove. The bizarre and obvious plastic surgery, which he denied. "People change when they get older," he told an interviewer, expecting this to be accepted as a plausible explanation for the narrowing of his nose and the sharpening of his chin and the lightening of his skin. He wanted us to believe that puberty gave him a dimple in his chin.

He started out as a Jehovah's Witness -- a troublesome faith at best. He converted in recent years to some sect of Islam, changing his name to Mikaeel.

He liked young boys, sexually. We don't wish to speak ill of the dead, because it offends the living who have fond feelings. But there's no doubt. He had a secret room in his home plastered with countless photos of bare-chested boys. The prosecution may not have met the burden of proof, but there was something like a 7 or 12 or 30 million dollar payoff to the 1994 boy, and I don't suppose it had anything to do with a paper route. It had to do with the fact that boys have penises. We don't like to judge by mere appearances, but when it rises above "mere" to a hard pattern, we might judge. The childish demeanor, the extremely sexual performances, the abused childhood, the lack of any apparent normal adult sexual contact with women -- well, all that might describe me. But I'm not famous, and haven't ever been formally accused of sexual misconduct with young boys, so don't bring me into this.

Michael Jackson is dead, then. He is not technically in hell yet. But he is undoubtedly damned. He's not damned because of the sex with boys thing. That's a sin, and a grave one, but it's forgivable, somehow. Call it grace. It is forgivable. I don't know that I would forgive it, especially with one of my boys. Pretty sure that the desert would have one more unmarked grave, in fact. Fortunately the point is moot. God forgives, or may forgive, such things. We killed his Son, after all, and God forgives it. Which is the point.

Michael Jackson started out as a JW, which cult denies the deity of Jesus. How then can we be saved? God forgives, but justice must be served. What can balance the scales? If sin is disobedience, and disobedience is mutiny, and the penalty for mutiny is death, who dies for our sin, our sins? Only someone who has enough life in him to pay not just for one sin of one man, but every sin of every person. Tall order, and no mere human has it in him to do so. Thus, God becomes man, to die, infinitely, to pay an infinite debt, not owed by him, but undertaken as an act of love for those who will have it. Those who deny that Jesus is God deny that he has the power to wipe away their sins. Which means they still have their sins. Sin is a ticket to hell, validated by death.

Jackson then became moslem muslim, so the news informed us. Whichever little moslem country it was that he went to, Bahrain, I always thought it was because they allow boylove there. Converting must have allowed him more liberty in his sexual tastes. That's what I thought. But it isn't his pedophilia that damns him. All moslems go to hell. So do all JWs. So do all Jews. So do all Christians. Everyone who depends on a label goes to hell. There are no Christians. There are only people who humble themselves enough to accept the only salvation there is, and those who don't.

Jackson is not yet technically in hell. He's awaiting that final judgment, and is presently in the holding cell of Sheol, which is on the far side of the abyss, the near side of which was Abraham's Bosom. When Jesus set the captives free, some time during the three days of his death, he ushered those souls, from Abel to the Good Thief, into the forecourt of Paradise, where they too await an ultimate reward. What of the damned? They remain, in dull agony presumably, suffering a thirst of their souls that can never be slaked.

Ah well. Michael Jackson is in hell because he chose to hold on to his sins, rather than load them onto the Cross. It's no more a tragedy than any other death. It was unexpected because it was, well, unexpected. We think we're safe. No one is safe. There is no prayer, no intercession, no drop of water, that can do Jackson any good now. Game over. He loses.

Weep if you must, for what ever reason. All our tears are for ourselves, though, our own sadness and empathies. Those who see our compassion may be moved and changed by it. The damned are all captives, though.

Jackson left some good music behind. But his life most likely was meaningless.


J

AEA

Upon reflection I find that I've written a surprising number of obituaries slash biographies for FP. George Carlin, Norman Mailer, Gerry Ford, Bing Crosby, GB Shaw, Seung-Hui Cho, Saddam Hussein (and here), Tisqantum, Thomas Paine, Richard Jewel -- probably more. Looks like I don't have many heroes. Over the weekend, David Carradine was found dead, hanging in a Bangkok hotel room closet. Well that's strange. First reports implied suicide, but it seems to have been accidental.

The man is dead, and can't defend himself against lies and rumors. So there's that. And usually I would just shrug something like this off. But I did go to school with Grasshopper, the child actor who played young Caine in the show Kung Fu. So I have payed attention to Carradine over the years. Always seemed like a very creepy guy. How he died is surprising, but then again, no, it's not.

Autoerotic asphyxiation, it seems. Accidental death, then. He had some sort of knots around his genitals. Radio says he had flames tattooed on his penis, and the yin-yang mandala tattooed on his scrotum, which also was pierced, with a gold chain somehow attached. It's surprising, and it's not. To me it would be a shameful thing, to be so discovered. But to do such things one must be shameless.

I've been sort of silly, here, recently. Either you get it or you don't. This is not more of that. That Carradine died in his early 70s in such a way is a profoundly sobering meditation on the depravity to which we may fall prey. That's my point. How twisted does a soul become, to find strangling oneself to be erotic?

I've given only passing thought to such practices as bondage and sadism and that subculture. It just seems pathetic to me, actually pathetic. To me sex is not a game, not play -- I don't need or want fantasy. Perhaps it's just my hormone levels -- I don't need such things. If rollplaying is necessary or exciting or any of that, all right then, have fun. But to me, sex is about intimacy. As I recall.

But that's not the case, with these paraphilias. Ideas of power and dominance and degradation and humiliation -- they have been sexualized, somehow. I understand it, as I understand many things, intellectually. It's just so sad, so lonely, so autoerotic, so asphyxiated.

My interest, insofar as something like this holds any interest, is in how one comes to such a state. A pierced scrotum, for crumb's sake. My instant, easy answer is that he was ruined as a child. I tend to think that adult perversions come from childhood molestations. A simplistic and we would hope probably mostly wrong answer, but it serves as a starting point. Alas, the radio, with several professional gossip mongers, says there were serious and substantiated intimations of incest against Carradine with a young female relative. Something about information in divorce papers, for what that's worth. Maybe nothing. After all, he cannot defend himself. Nor could the minor child, if it's true. Point is, if it's true, if, if, then there is no depravity of which he was not capable, and there is powerful expectation that this perversion, like a genetic mutation, was inherited. Vampires breed.

A more likely answer, from a comprehensibility standpoint -- I mean, is incest actually even possible? -- is the abuse of neglect. Self-esteem doesn't just happen. It is nurtured, by finding what is good in a child, and helping it become excellence. They are after all seedlings, that need watering.

Let's be magnanimous then in our gossip mongering. The neglect form of abuse manifests as sexual twistedness because sex is the most intimacy-directed of our instincts. We all want intimacy, but those of us who have been neglected were not shown how to ask for it, and the instinct that is associated with it is likewise skewed away from a healthy expression. So we may end up alone hanging naked in a closet with a rope around our genitals. Or we may just end up alone.

Yes, I understand it. Even if I'm not right, it's easy to understand.


J

Come, let us reason...

Thomas Paine is far more important than you know. Utterly pivotal in creating the mood for the American Revolution. Not a hero though, by any manner of means -- at least not heroic in his mien. He was a face-on-the-table drunkard, notoriously filthy in his hygiene. Yet his portrait has him smiling -- a rare thing for that age.


Even Ben Franklin appears more pursed than smiling -- the upturned lips seem to be just the way his mouth is shaped. But Tom is smiling. A modern man, indeed.

In England he had been a merchant seaman, a corset shop owner, a tax collector, a staymaker, a servant, an Anglican minister (!), and a schoolteacher. Failure dogged him. At age 38 he effectively abandoned his second wife and fled to the distant shores and presumed prosperity of the American Colonies. The shores proved prosperous, but prosperity proved distant. He wrote so well you'd think he'd be a thousandaire, what with an astronomicial 400,000 copies of his Common Sense being sold. But he published anonymously, and he gave his copyright to the Continental Congress.

For this, we forgive him his filth and his abandonment and his failures.

He called the King "a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man". He said that everything "that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to part.'" Neither of these is, strictly speaking, true. They're not even true figuratively. They are just propaganda and high-flown invective. John Adams, that acrid little man, styled Common Sense "a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass." But here we are, enjoying the outworkings of Paine's nominal truths and crapulent exudations.

For this, we remember him as great.

His seems to be the first use of "the United States of America." He seems to have been the first to use "Republic" in its modern, positive sense, and is said to have given the word "revolution" its political meaning (although what then of the "Glorious Revolution"? -- did that pick up its current name later? A historiographical question). Paine knew how to use words. Not an innovator, not a great or subtle thinker, but a wordsmith. The first great American adman. The P.T. Barnum of the Revolution.

He was no officer of the Continental Army. A common foot soldier. In France, Robespierre clapped him in irons. Back in America, obscure and impoverished, he became little better than the town drunk. Shortly prior to his death an old friend found him passed out in a tavern, reeking with "the most disagreeable smell possible." He wore utter rags and had not trimmed his nails in years. He had to be bathed and scrubbed down three times before he was tolerable.

Paul Jacob tells us that “a former political opponent [William Cobbett] dug up his body and brought it to England, where the brain got removed from the skull; where the skull and arm got removed from the rest; where most of it got lost in a bizarre string of inheritances by dissidents who supported free speech, republicanism, evolution, phrenology -- and bizarreries even greater than the pseudoscience of head bumps. But the shriveled brain somehow came home to America.” Some of his bones were carted off by a rag-and-bone man. Perhaps they were fed to dogs. Calls to mind the fate of the Mayflower: broken up and used to build a barn in Buckinghamshire.

For all this, we are reminded to tend wisely to our own affairs.

Paine was an atheist, or if not, his great hatred was certainly the God of the Bible -- God, and King George. “Yet this is trash that the Church imposes upon the world as the Word of God; this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! This is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!” Sort of ties God’s hands, doesn’t it, if he can’t reveal himself. Well, Paine allows for one way: “Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it.” No room for faith, here ... but faith is so hard.

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of.” So … what’s he saying? I don’t get it. He doesn’t like creeds? -- or Churches? Am I missing something? It doesn't seem clear. ”My own mind is my own Church.” Oh, so he doesn’t like other people’s churches. And since a “creed” is just a statement of belief, yet all his writings are about his beliefs, then … uh, he only believes his own beliefs? Fair enough. That’s pretty much the way everyone feels.

“What is it the Bible teaches us? -- raping, cruelty, and murder.” Honestly? Might you suppose he demonstrates an imperfect mastery of theological exegesis?

“What is it the New Testament teaches us? -- to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.” His understanding of the mechanism of the Incarnation seems imperfect.

“The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.” Yes -- although some believe the “Christian system” commenced with the Fall from Grace.

“That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.” Agreed. What religion does that come from?

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” I’d argue with him, except I don't argue with dead men. Whatever demons tormented Thomas Paine in his final days, they did not write the Bible.

For all this, and given the state in which he went down to death, we must remember him with pity. And with dread.


J

Funny Man

George Carlin is dead, for several months now. His corpse lies inflated with preservative fluids in the satin-lined box where it will remain until erosion or flood or the vicissitudes of environment spew it out, or some real estate developer relocates it, or until Jesus comes and calls it from the dark and the stillness of its supposed eternal rest. By now his back has flattened and taken on the texture of the cloth and foam rubber and wood that support his bones and increasingly leather-like flesh. His eyes have dried and sunk into his skull. The mortician's makeup has pealed from his face, the rouge is ghastly against the gray of his skin. It must be everything of death that he expected. He had hoped there was no other life.

It made the news, a lot, whenever it was, those several months ago. Carlin, of the seven dirty words.When I heard it first, in the 70s, it seemed a bit funny. Not so much because I was a teenager and it was naughty, as that my peers thought it was funny, and it was novel. The unexpected is often reacted to with laughter. That was his shtick. Shock value, mostly.

I found some of his HBO specials online and took a look for a bit. Colossally unfunny. Bad, actually. He opens with some some rapid fire doggerel about nothing. All about words -- here at sec :28. The fact that his monkey faces don't quite go with the highly verbal act -- nobody ever seemed to see the incongruity.

And after his "highwire" linguistical display -- that any talented teenager with a notebook and some time could have cobbled together -- he comes out with a repeat and riff on a putatively hilarious vulgarity that he used to open an HBO show years before. A hideously purile non-sequitur that I won't repeat. It's a dilly. Har har har. Cuz it's so good, y'see. Did I mention, har?

The audience stands for him, when he first comes on. They know his act, his style, and think it's worth standing for. Standing in line, standing in ovation, standing as in tolerating. I smiled, once. At the word "dingleberry." The rest of it left me, well, not numb -- indifferent. What a fool.

This is the guy I heard once on some sententious talkshow intone the marxist truism, property is theft. He meant it. Of course he did. Check out 6:50. The sincerity of his venom leaves no doubt. Now the only property he owns -- well it's not his plot, it's not even his flesh. He owns nothing. He is at last no longer a thief.

Is my belated obituary too harsh? Should we show more grace to the departed? But funerals are not for the dead. Nothing remains that we can do for them. I am harsh as a salutary reminder to the living. The clay of our bodies will grow cold once more, and return indistinguishable to the earth. The conceits with which we amuse ourselves will deceive and delude us only until the light of our eyes goes out, and we are summoned into a greater light, or the yawning darkness that children dread under their beds. There must be joy, but there is certainly something to fear. Our scorn will not protect us. The nuns were right, mostly. Because Carlin found their errors, he hated their truths. Now hell welcomes him, and there is no comfort possible.

We use laughter to escape, and to approach. We use it to isolate and to bond. Often but not always it is a nasty thing. Laughter is like dreaming -- a way of adjusting and of processing. But that's not my point. My point is Carlin. He used his gifts the same way he used drugs. Not to heal. To hide. Now his body is hidden in the dirt. He soul is hidden from all peace, and he is without excuse.

Why pick on Carlin? He fell before my eyes, is why. Be glad that it wasn't you who did. There is little mercy in the world. If you wish there were more, make it.


J

G.B.S., S.I.B.

When GB Shaw made his trip to America in 1935 many caustic remarks dripped from his lips. An acerbic sense of humor had he. 

Joseph Mitchell recorded his observations of the man. When a reporter asked Shaw if he was interested in a congress of the literary great to suppress war, Shaw replied, "Why should they suppress war? War is just a method of killing people. There are a great many people who ought to be killed." "Do you think the English people ought to be killed?" Shaw declined to respond. "How about the Irish people?" "Yes, almost all the Irish should be killed." And indeed they should be. Shaw himself was Irish. Stinking Irish bastard.

Shaw opined that the function of American "newspapers" (the television of that day) existed for the purpose of concealing the truth. A reporter responded, "I would like to tell you I think that isn't true." "I am very amazed at your state of innocence." Shaw continued, "Sometimes I stand amazed at the American people and wonder what will happen to them." "Do you think there is any hope of us changing?" "You better ask the Almighty about that." "I didn't know you had relations with the Almighty, Mr. Shaw." "No, but the American people have." "Where do you think you will go when you die, Mr. Shaw." "I sincerely hope when I die it will be the end of me. Do you think I am entertaining an eternity of George Bernard Shaw? How do you like the idea?"

"Do you enjoy making insulting remarks?" "Now, look here. If I say to an American, 'You've got a hat on,' he runs up and says, 'See here, what do you mean saying I have a hat on.'" "What do you think the next civilization will be?" "For all we know, the next civilization may be Negro." "Do you find humanity as stupid as you did when you were young?" "I look at the children leaving the schoolhouses. They seem to be the same old lot. I'm disappointed."

Later Mr. Shaw was asked about the Scottsboro case. "Blow the Scottsboro case! I didn't come here to interfere with your silly laws." In a speech the previous evening at the New York Opera House he had called the American Constitution "a charter of anarchy." "I meant just that! It should be set aside! It is merely an accumulation of efforts on the part of a people to escape governing themselves." In the Scottsboro case, the Supreme Court upheld the principle that defendants have a fundamental right to competent council.

On stage the night before Shaw had asserted, per Mitchell, that regarding the economic crisis of that decade, "even the smallest smattering of knowledge of political science would teach us that the first thing to do to get out of the present mess is to nationalize the banks." Shaw must no doubt have meant economic science rather than political. He spent a good portion of his sixteen thousand oratorical words and 100 minutes berating every salient American institution, for which he was applauded, vigorously, by the cosmopolitan crowd. Mitchell recorded that the audience "displayed more laughter than applause when he said America might possibly save the world."

Shaw believed that private charity was a "pernicious invasion of public duty." Earlier that year, when sent a postcard requesting a charitable donation to the Children's Aid Society of London, Shaw scrawled on the back of the card, "why not give the little invalids a gorgeous party and then, when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven?" He was an idealist then, a Utopian socialist, avid supporter and apologist for Stalin, denier and explainer of the pogroms, a vegetarian, anti-tobacconist, and an agitator for the adoption of a new purely phonemic alphabet -- a socialist as I say, an atheist, and a stinking Irish bastard ... but I seem to have lost the thread of my thought.


J

Norman Mailer

Obviously I do a lot more reading than these little efforts might suggest. Most of it just drifts before my eyes like so many candy wrappers and dead leaves washing along in the gutter. So the fact that Norman Mailer died Saturday may well have gone unnoticed, here. Great writers, real writers die all the time without comment from me. I hardly have an opinion about Mailer. A buffoon in the forecourt of the illgliterati. A big little dick regretting its circumcision because of the consequent lost millimeters of girth. That's not much of an opinion.

When a friend attacked his mistress with a knife, Mailer's response was, "God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” Then, some years later, Mailer ... stabbed one of his wives with a penknife. He head-butted Truman Capote, for crimeny's sake. Would you catch the sarcasm if I called him a real macho man?

His calculated reflexive employment of terms like superficial and pontifications and self-advertisements in his titles fails to be either ironic or apologetic, self-aware or humble. In the light of his content material, they come off merely as cheap. We all enjoy the turning of a phrase, but we'd hope there is some purpose to it other than the sound of the words. Most of us are, after all, no longer sixteen.

In 1973 Mailer opined, "I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, 'You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.' I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

"But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her."

Aside from the obtuseness of the words themselves, there is no indication that Mailer is not entirely serious. If he was being wry, it would have been a perpetual and immovable mask, making him a genius of existential dissimilitude ranking only with Lee Harvey Oswald -- who if anything other than a life-long moron, was an artist in the clay of himself rivalled by no one in the annals of brilliance save Norman Mailer. Perhaps they were the same man. Did anyone ever see them together? Mailer wrote about himself in the third person in his The Armies of the Night; maybe he did the same in his (auto-)biography of Oswald?

Mailer's views and obsessions about violence, sex and sodomy are hardly worth noticing. They were his themes. In the only novel of his that I ever attempted to read, An American Dream, assigned in the late seventies by a college English professor, we open with the strangulation of a wife, then proceed immediately to anal intercourse with a house maid -- by the same man if not upon the same woman. A work of art, no doubt.

I would hope that anyone who noticed my efforts here, and reported on them, would let my own words stand as my introduction and my conclusion. Allow me to let Mailer pronounce upon himself. One of his literary finds and causes was Jack Henry Abbott, co-prisoner with the unlamented Gary Gilmore, who wrote to Mailer from prison. Abbott was a diagnosed psychopath with a penchant for quoting Marx. Mailer helped in the publication of Abbott's letters, collected as In the Belly of the Beast, and was instrumental in bringing about his early parole into the employ of Mailer. “Culture,” Mailer said, “is worth a little risk.”

Six weeks after his parole Abbott stabbed Richard Adan, 22 years old, Cuban-American, part-time waiter with aspirations as an actor and playwright. In the heart. He died smiling. Adan had told Abbott that the restroom was for staff only. That would be really annoying. I can see Abbott's point -- motive, that is, not knife. Abbott took it on the lam for a while, and was finally apprehended working in a Louisiana oilfield. He was given 15 years to life for manslaughter. He hanged himself in prison in 2002. Interesting side note: Actress Susan Sarandon named her son, Jack Henry Robbins, after Abbott.

Roger Kimball records, "Mailer testified on Abbott’s behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adan’s family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: 'I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.' [When] asked 'who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans?' ... Mailer had no response but bluster: 'What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask?'" A reporter told Mailer he was "full of shit."

The mask slips. What is it that Mailer was examining for all those years, with all those words and paragraphs? Clearly not himself.

In "The White Negro" he says, "The only Hip morality ... is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and ... to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone because that is one’s need. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man’s desire contains its antithesis of human cooperation."

Did you catch it? the contradiction? Not that sophomoric, almost unbearable "nihilistic" "antithesis" crap -- rather, the whenever it is possible? It is always possible to do the possible things that one feels. His qualifier is his unthinking admission of his phoniness. While urging for the savage spontaneity of the psychopath, his own inhibitions break out like nose-pimples and show him up as a poseur and liar. Pathetic.

Mailer supposes that the street thug "murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well ... violates private property ... enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly."

What can I say? God, what an idiot. The criminal knows his relationship with the police as well as the commuter knows his bus schedule. It is his role in society. Maybe the bus will be late. Maybe the criminal will be caught. Mailer was an idiot.

Everything he wrote was about words. There can be no greater insult to a writer. Certainly I cannot object to his narcissism and his stylistic effluvia. The pages of FP are filled with Rabelaisian excess. But I'm harmless. He was a macho hollow man obsessed with sodomy and impotence, who used women as a rage-pillow he could masturbate into -- toxic in his lifestyle and his social impact. 

If we feel any emotion about him, it will be contempt. If we must make a judgement, it is that he was a moral idiot.

J

*Richard Jewell

YT

Don’t you just hate him? Fat loser. Disgusting. He’s the human pig who planted a bomb at the ’96 Atlanta Olympics, and then pretended to be a hero by warning people away from it … just before it exploded!!!! Golly, he musta bin so smart and brave and observant!!! Attention, everyone! Lookit me bein’ a real-life genuwine heeero!!! What a unabomber. Somebody shoulda unabombed his unibrow. So they caught him, and it turns out he was just as much of a loser as we know he was. Lived with his mommy. Wanted to be a cop but couldn’t hack it. So he settled for rent-a-cop. And now he’s dead, age 44, of a heart attack of course. Disgusting.

Yep.

Oh. Did I say he was guilty? My bad. Heh heh. Turns out he was innocent. Falsely accused then, by the sages of virtue in the media. 

The New York Times reported in October 1996, when he was cleared as a suspect, that "a number of law-enforcement officials have said privately for months that they thought Mr. Jewell had been involved in the bombing, even though there was no evidence against him and some evidence seemed to rule him out".^[11]

Jewell was never charged officially, but the FBI thoroughly and publicly searched his home twice, questioned his associates, investigated his background, and maintained 24-hour surveillance of him. The scrutiny began to ease only after Jewell's attorneys hired an ex-FBI agent to administer a polygraph, which Jewell passed.^[10]

A Justice Department investigation of the FBI's conduct found that the FBI had tried to cause Jewell to waive his constitutional rights by telling him he was participating with a training movie about bomb detection, although the report concluded "no intentional violation of Mr. Jewell's civil rights and no criminal misconduct" had occurred

==

On October 26, 1996, the US Attorney in Atlanta, Kent Alexander, sent Jewell a letter saying "based on the evidence developed to date ... Richard Jewell is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing on July 27, 1996, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta". The letter did not include an apology, but in a separate statement issued by Alexander, the U.S. Justice Department regretted the leaking of the investigation

''

but not for being 

  incompetent asshole scum...   later, .  

Three FBI agents were censured afterward by the Department of Justice:^[24][25]

1. Woody Johnson - Head of FBI Atlanta office
2. David Tubbs - Head of FBI Kansas City office
3. Donald Johnson

The dogs had no problem sniffing out his private details and dragging them all across the news. Leno called him the Unadoofus. His mother was, inevitably, the Una-mamma. Tee hee. Jump in, boys. The blood’s fine!

The real bomber? Eric Rudolph, who later bombed a couple of abortion mills and a gay nightclub. I hardly know what to say. Can’t see a connection. The Olympics are gay? Abortionists are gay? Abortion is gay like the Olympics? I don’t get it. Gays should be aborted at the Olympics? Huh?

Fun Fact: Real-killer Eric Rudolph lived as a fugitive for five years, hiding in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains where he ate acorns and salamanders, raided vegetable gardens and grain silos, and rummaged through dumpsters. Bonus Fun Fact: Eric’s older brother, Daniel, deliberately severed one of his hands from his body with a radial-arm saw and mailed out a videotape of the spectacle along with the narrative explanation that the act was designed to "send a message to the FBI and the media." The hand was reattached surgically.

Then there is former-Senator Larry Craig, who resigned after massive media coverage of his guilty plea to disorderly conduct in a washroom.

One of these things is not like the other. The media whores don’t care about guilt or innocence. They care about news, by which is meant fame, agenda and profit. One of the whores, by the name of Tom Brokaw, "reported" of Jewell that "speculation is that the FBI is close to making the case. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case." 

"Holes" in this instance must mean "innocence." Brokaw is probably a poet, to use words so elliptically, probably an ax-murderer poet -- a drug-addict, child-molesting ax-murderer poet. In the future everyone will be falsely accused for fifteen minutes. That's not the difference.

Craig pled guilty. Jewell was guilty of nothing. Craig has a trail of accusations stretching back at least 40 years. Jewell’s record includes saving the life of a choking baby. When Craig was arrested, he displayed, perhaps angrily, perhaps arrogantly, his Senate identification, perhaps expecting it to buy him special treatment. Jewell was an honest to God hero. Craig cut short his career as surely as if he'd used a radial-arm saw. Jewell died because of damage done to his heart.

So now we’ll take another look at that photo of Richard Jewell, and we’ll see a good man, for all we know, and one certainly worthy of our public praise and respect. If only we could know about such things before it was too late. But who will inform us? The whores? Better to know nothing, than to know lies.


J

Side Show

Ali Al Massedy, who videoed Saddam’s hanging, said, “I saw fear. He was afraid.”

Do you see it?
Yes. Of course. It’s not terror, not dread. Fear is exactly what it is. And yes, fool that I am, I do feel compassion.

He is numb. He is fighting to contain his bowels. He is aware of the air passing through his nostrils. His testicals have drawn up into his body. The corners of his mouth pull down. Time is slow, but there is so little of it. The rope of the noose scrapes his ear as it passes over his head -- it is rough, and it roars like the end of the world.

The platform gives out under him.

He dies instantly. His body twitches.

When the execution was over and the witnesses had returned to the Green Zone, they were met with cheers. Massedy stated, "All Iraqis will be happy from the north to the south to the east to the west."

They have a right to rejoice. It means something to them. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of one and a half million people. Every Iraqi will have known someone who was raped or tortured or killed. Compassion for Saddam would be taken by them as a profound moral corruption. Ding dong, the witch is dead. But the east has many witches.

He was clutching a Koran. You can’t see that. Its comfort can only have been emotional. There was no spiritual relief. We know this because of his final words. "He was saying things about injustice, about resistance, about how these guys are terrorists."

A blustering fool, then. A bitter old man stupid with indignation. On December 13, 2003, when he was pulled out of the pit he was hiding in, the first thing he told his captors was: "I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq and I am willing to negotiate." Yesterday in the looming presence of the gallows he said: “Iraq without me is nothing.” Perhaps those were his last words. The reality was that Saddam, without Iraq, was nothing.

He died an unrepentant fool, too possessed by arrogance and narcissism to meet death with even a shred of real dignity. He had only the dignity of contained fear.



J

Rope

Saddam was executed today. I heard it on the radio. The Shiites are firing celebratory rounds into the air. The Sunnis are exploding themselves in marketplaces. The Kurds are going about their business, building a free and just society. The lefties are clucking their tongues and saying Saddam was murdered. Really. I heard it with my own ears. The rightwing fascist bloodthirsty monster bigots, such as myself, feel no need to have an emotion. Justice is satisfying only sometimes. Frequently it is just ugly.

I take no pleasure in the destruction of human life. The pleasure that I might take can only be in the balancing of the scales. It is an abstract, but I live much more in the world of ideas than of practicalities -- despite all my usual protestations to the contrary. We cannot escape our temperaments, any more than we can escape our fate.

Saddam has gone down into the dust, and further, into Hell. Good. But that "good" is not an emotion. It is the successful outworking of an equation. As I have elsewhere said, justice is an appropriate and equal response. Take a life unjustly, lose your life. That seems like perfect justice. Other cases, such as rape, seem more problematic. Rape, and be raped? I expect that would involve some variation of sodomy, which is not an equal response, for all that it may be appropriate. Rape, and be castrated? Rape, and be stoned? Rape, and be forced to marry the woman? You see the problem. But the death penalty is ideal.

As for Hell, one might wonder how eternal torment is an appropriate response for finite wrongdoing. There are lots of ways to answer that. I'll keep it simple. Some people have garbage for souls, and they belong in the garbage heap. The suffering isn't environmental, it's existential. They are made for the fire. That brings into question the nature of a God who would create souls only that they might go to Hell. The short answer is that, per the biblical tradition, that is just the case, and if you don't like it, you don't like reality. And keep in mind that the only sense of justice that we can have, is the one that God made us to have. The longer answer is that everyone does indeed have free will, and some people use that freedom always to rebel and never to repent. Their condemnation is as complete as their rebellion. Infinite.

What does this have to do with Saddam and his execution? He's just another example of what's wrong with humanity. He had power, and he used it only to glorify himself. Whatever theology you might happen to subscribe to, you can see how wrong that is. Power is a responsibility. Whatever our complaint with God is about the corruption of this world, there is a more visible cause of pain. Leaders must be accountable. If they do not lead in a democratic manner, then only rougher justice can ever set things right. The danger to an absolute ruler is that his reign can be abreviated only in disgrace. Once off the world stage as an actor, he must become a pathetic freak or a pitiful watchword. In this instance, disgrace was consumated in death.

Today, one of the former princes of the world has taken his final fall. It was short, with a sudden stop. The process of justice was long, but its end will have lasted the breadth of a heartbeat. And then silence.


J

Ford

Jerry Ford died today. He was the only president who was never elected to the Executive Branch. Vice Presidents have become unelected presidents -- but they were elected as VPs. I was talking just a few days ago to a young fella about the Nixon days -- he had no idea about any of it.

Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s first VP. He was, as memory serves, the most hated politician in the history of the Republic -- more hated than Aaron Burr (killer of Alexander Hamilton, and architect of future-Democrat party den-of-corruption Tammany Hall), more hated than Jefferson Davis (Democrat senator and Pres of the Democrat-led Slave Power Confederacy), more hated than Abraham Lincoln (co-founder of the Republican party, Great Emancipator, assassination-victim of John Wilkes Booth, rabid Democrat partisan).  In world history, Agnew is hated somewhere between Nero and Vlad the Impaler, both anti-republicans.

Agnew had to resign in 1973 because of tax evasion charges. He pleaded nolo contendere, and was later disbarred. A real clinton.  Yes, he took bribes. But he wasn’t hated for that. He was hated because he was Nixon’s hatchet man against the war protesters. We do know, by now, that the peaceniks are only peaceful when it comes to foreign enemies. Political enemies they hate with an abiding hatred.  

Nixon and Agnew don’t seem to have been great friends, though. Agnew blamed Nixon for leaking reports of the bribery charges -- as a distraction from Watergate. They never met after he left office. Well, Agnew went to the funeral in ’94. A reconciliation of sorts. Unless he pissed on the grave -- if so, it went unreported.

So as of Oct. 10, 1973, there was no vice president. Well, Andrew Johnson didn't have a vice president at all. TR didn’t have one throughout his first term -- and Coolidge, and Truman, and LBJ.  Problem is, Nixon did have this Watergate problem going on. Can’t have no VP when the President himself might vacate the office. Thus, Jerry Ford was appointed. Nixon selected him.  Approved by Congress.  Voila!  A new Vice President. Ten months later Nixon resigned. I cried, at the time. The dishonor of it. Thus Jerry Ford became president, having been unelected to the vice presidency, and unelected to the presidency.

The Accidental President … that’s what they call such promoted VPs, but Ford was constantly reported in the news as clumsy. You youngsters may have wondered what Chevy Chase’s crappy SNL Ford impersonation was about -- that’s it. It was completely unfair, but Carter was attacked by a rabbit, so there you go.

A lot is being said about Ford's decency. Seems like a nice guy. What is it with the '70s? Ford, and Carter. Two really nice guys. But not what you'd call presidential material. Ford did, did indeed have his problems. But Hitchens loves finding fault. Shall we say, mistakes were made?

Pardoned Nixon a month after he took office. Approval rating went from 70% down into the 30s. But later the Kennedy’s gave him the Profiles in Courage Award. It was the right thing to do. Enough, already. Wisdom is not about justice. We’re still technically at war with North Korea, after all -- what should we do with the enemy who just got nukes? Justice says destroy them. Maybe wisdom does too, but that's not my call. Pardoning Nixon was Ford's call, and it was right. The clinton impeachment doesn't seem to have been good for the country. I'm positive a resignation would have been wonderful. As for a pardon, that would have been a small price to pay. Ah -- if only there had been a President Gore! Then there would have been no 2000 election problem! Then there would have been no 9/11 problem! The islamists would love us! Happy days! Which brings us back to Ford.

Nelson Rockefeller was appointed as Ford’s VP -- at which point it becomes a bit surreal -- unelected and appointed as VP by a former unelected appointed VP who became the unelected President. Rockefeller was photographed giving someone the finger, I remember. 

Johnny Carson made a joke about it: “Somebody asked Rockefeller how many billions of dollars he had. ‘One. I have one billion.’”  Guffaws.

Now Ford is dead. Oldest president ever. Beat Reagan by a month.

These things come in threes, I’ve noticed. Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby and Charlie Chaplin died within a few months of each other in late 1977. Seemed like a big deal at the time. Of course Elvis and Freddy Prinze went around then too, but we’ll make some excuse as to why that doesn’t spoil the pattern. Well? James Brown died yesterday. Ford died today. This time, we know who the third man is. Some time within the next few days or weeks, Saddam Hussein will hang by the neck until he is dead. So it’s not all bad.



J

Great Man

Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki says that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and a number of aids were killed Wednesday evening when US jet fighters dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house in Hibhib, near Baquba in Diyala province, 30 miles NE of Baghdad. Local residents of the area provided the intel. So Zarqawi has been killed. Founder of al-Queda in Iraq. Organizer of terror. Mad bomber. Producer of snuff films. Hell hath expanded its borders, slightly. May he be buried with maggots.

Without Napoleon, there would have been no Napoleonic Wars. The times in themselves were not right. He made them right. He shaped the world to his will. He was a great man. Did I say good? No. But great.

Without Lincoln, there would still be a Confederate States of America. Lincoln was that unique combination of a politician and a man of iron principle. He would not be bowed, he would not be broken. By force of will and with consummate skill he cajoled and wheedled and flattered and compromised, and exercised raw force, until the war was won. Did I say there were no mistakes? No. But any other man would have counted the cost, and thought a United States not worth the price. Or he would have been too fierce, too intemperate, too forthright, and would have lost Congress to the Democrat Copperheads in the ’62 elections, and the cause would have been lost. Lincoln was the essential man.

Hitler was a great man. No, I did not say good. But his influence was without match in the 20th Century. Time Magazine got it wrong – it wasn’t Einstein but Hitler who was Man of the Century. Too bad, eh? But without him, there would be no UN, no NATO, no European Union. There would be no Israel , and thus no spur to Islamism. There would be no Islamism, with its roots so clearly buried in Nazi doctrine.

So now Zarqawi, along with Hitler, is being sodomized by Satan in hell. It’s the only just thing Satan can do. Hurrah for Satan. But while Zarqawi partook of his full measure of Hitler-like evil – of Satanic evil - he enjoys no part of greatness. To be the organizer of car bomb terrorism is not a great thing. To froth Allahu Akbar at the camera over the screams of a beheading-victim is horrifying – doubly so – but it is insane and pathetic, not great. His influence will last only as long as the families he has harmed remember their pain. That’s too long, but it has no part of greatness.

Christopher Hitchens makes a case for the importance of Zarqawi's removal. I am in full accord with him. But as to whether or not it truly was Zarqawi himself who alone chose the targets of his lackies, or whether he was simply a deciding vote who directed the bombs to an obvious target, I do not know. Perhaps he was a genius of evil. I doubt it, but I don't know. Attacking the UN in Baghdad, killing the sane and probably benevolent Shiite Ayatollah Hakim, stealing any respite of peace from the oppressed Iraqis after a third of a century of Baathist torment, targetting all Shiites in Iraq simply to destroy any possiblity of compromise - these were shrewd moves. But they place Zarqawi not on any plain of greatness, but rather in the rogue's gallary of gangster thugs waging a turf war.

Alas, it would be better if Zarqawi had been great. If so, then his delayed dispatch into the dirt would make a difference. If he had been the essential man, then his loss would cause crippling dismay and confusion to the enemy. As it is, some other hateful hack with a poisonous tongue and a more-poisonous spirit will step eventually into Zarqawi’s still-smoldering shoes, and the business of chaos will proceed apace. Himmler could not have replaced Hitler. Hamlin – or Johnson, in reality - could not replace Lincoln. But any venomous anti-Semite with a glib tongue and a butcher’s soul can take Zarqawi’s place. And in any case most of the violence originates not from some infernal Islamist centralized HQ, but from loosely organized cult-gangs. Zarqawi had his greatest effect as a symbol, not as an individual. Now he is the symbol of a dead terrorist - oh, wait ... that's the reality. I can't think what he may be the symbol for. Um, the symbol for a bankrupt religion of hate? - but that's still too literal.

In any case, we are not fighting men. Our adversary is a faith, that appeals to the most ignorant and basest part of mankind, that believes in an abstract enemy responsible for all the woes which its own culture is too shallow and weak to take responsibility for. In itself this is no rare thing. Many unbalanced people blame outside forces for their own self-generated failures. In just this way, many religionists blame Satan for every little bother. But that we are the Satan of the Mosque Lady of Islamism is just an unfortunate embarrassment for us, which will ultimately prove to have been for them a very stupid choice. They should have chosen a different enemy – a weaker one. Because this particular Satan - us - just got done sodomizing Zarqawi, royally, and being young and vigorous, we're ready to go again. Grrr.

As for us, we are bearing the pain of our own irresponsibility, our own harvest-time fiddling rather than reaping. But we are a great people, who have shaped the world into what it presently is. And we will shape it again, should we find the fortitude, into a likeness more pleasing to our values. In the meantime, we will continue to send down these little Zarqawis as they raise themselves up – send them down into the cold darkness of death and the hot torment of hell. Get in line, boys. Hell has plenty of room, for such little people.



J