The Whitest White

Sarah Palin and Tea Parties go together well, a speaker with no ideas addressing a group with no solutions, and enjoying rich media coverage for inane remarks.

"How's that hopey changey thing working out for you?" is Palin's zinger, making her sound more like Tina Fey than ever, an actual parody of herself. What I have never heard from Palin or any Tea Partiers is what they will do if things go against them, like getting laid off and finding out you have a skin cancer that needs treatment. What will you do when your children are no longer under your medical insurance coverage because they are not full-time students and are over 18? Suppose your daughter has a chronic bronchial condition? Your son is injured in an accident?

What I see are rooms full of overweight white people, cheering on a dynamic lady who looks like she'd be tons of fun with a couple drinks in her. I do not see a black, red, or yellow face anywhere. The whole thing reminds me of Homeowners Association meetings, where the board sits around and discusses raising the fine for not rolling up your garden hose. And when a hurricane hits, they all step down, quit, disappear.

Early Termination

I never understood why the Death Watch for senior citizens got such bad press during the election. How long do you have to live before you're in control of (your)life and (your)death? Martha Gellhorn committed suicide at 90. She had a full, rich, adventurous life. You'd think a couple more years either way wouldn't matter. But she had gone blind, and this independent woman could not bear the handicap.

I wrote a story that appears at BewilderingStories.com about Early Termination, a new option from the government after the collapse of Social Security. No, I didn't start the Death Watch rumors.

In college, we called this the Silver Bullet theory. This basically said that at the end of our days, we should have the option of a Silver Bullet, like in the werewolf movies. Sitting in a nursing home, abandoned by family and friends, doped into a vegetative senility, put to bed before you want and awakened like a jailhouse prisoner, fed Godawful mush, denied cigarettes and booze and any kind of stimulation, no thanks. Give me a Silver Bullet any day. Read the story , entitled "Land of Opportunity," here: http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue271/land_opportunity.html

Incredible Woman

I'm reading Caroline Moorehead's biography of Martha Gellhorn (Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life, Henry Holt and Company, New York) and it is one of the most fascinating stories I've ever encountered. Gellhorn, while still in her twenties, covered the poverty caused by the Great Depression for Harry Hopkins and the Roosevelts, who wanted first-hand knowledge of what was happening in America. She became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and actually lived at the White House from time to time, as did other writers and international visitors. During the Spanish Civil War, she lived at the Hotel Florida in Madrid and became involved with Ernest Hemingway. Their love story during the war and explosions and rise of fascism is well told by Moorehead. Gellhorn eventually became the 3rd Mrs. Hemingway, a title she rejected later in life, never wanting to be hidden in his gigantic shadow.

PBS quotes one of her pieces, written during the shelling of Madrid:

www.pbs.org/.../reporters/gellhorn/madrid.html

"So now the square is empty, though people are leaning close against the houses around it, and the shells are falling so fast that there is almost no time between them to hear them coming, only the steady roaring as they land on the granite cobblestones.

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that.

She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.
A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: GET OUT OF MADRID."

Martha was 28 when she witnessed that scene and wrote about it.

Barbie and Ken in 2012

Scott Brown's election as Senator in MASS, despite a lack of credentials or experience though he has posed nude, shows that yes, white Americans can turn out in force. A Palin/Brown ticket in 2012 would give the American people a chance to vote for Barbie and Ken, without having to buy new action figures. As a voter, interviewed coming from the polling station said, "I don't like this health care thing. I don't know much about it, but I've heard it's bad. So I voted for Brown."

There's an online game called Tiger's Trangressions. In it, you use your mouse to help Tiger knock down his mistresses with golf shots before she can reach the TV news van. Click here to go to Ho #1.
http://www.atom.com/fun_games/tiger_woods_defense/?xrs=eml_121709

The Moving Hand Writes

My own handwriting seems ugly to me, and I have trouble writing drafts of stories in longhand because of it. The computer gives me the illusion of deniability, but writing in my own hand is personally condemning, like there's no getting out of this one. I know much better writers, professionals with years of experience and books that line shelves published under their names, who write all their first drafts by hand. I can't do it. The scrawl seems like something excreted, and some Freudian-Norman O. Brown thing kicks in, and I want to hide what's been produced, like a booger or poo. Weird, right? Something traumatic must have happened, like the notebooks I once kept must have been found and read aloud to an unintended audience, and some generous amount of shame produced. But I remember no specific incident. Blocking it, or denial, seems likely. I don't trust memory much to start out with. We remember what we want.

Yet I don't mind producing this poo for all to see. There's a distance between me and it, a machine in between, and the machine might be doing this while I sleep for all you know. Mechanically produced poo, like the plastic doggies for sale during Christmas, that do number one and number two when you push their little buttons.

What a gross monologue. But much of the news that comes uninvited into my home seems the same. Earthquake victims reaching to the camera as tons of debris crush their legs, horses slaughtered while alive for sausage meat, children who disappear only to be found dead days later, supposedly Christian men like Pat Robertson saying Haiti made a deal with the Devil and was cursed, rather than mention the population dragged from Africa in chains by Christian slavers, and made to stay there against their wills. The mechanical poo seems endless, feeding on itself, and now available on 500 channels, the internet, iPods, Twits, and blogs like this one.

Communication

I found this in the Preface to Douglas Hofstadter's I Am A Strange Loop. Hofstadter is the author of Godel Escher Bach, and Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University. His books are all published by Basic Books and available everywhere.

"And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences." (p.xv)

What is the book about? Try this from the jacket blurb:

Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it can, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?

2010: The Year The Martians Arrive

A great thing about starting a new decade is the opportunity to contemplate how close we are to all the weird events predicted in science fiction during the 20th Century. We're in the brave new world, and 1984 has come and gone, and 2001's odyssey is now 2010's sequel. The future is now a couple weekends away. This is the year the Martians arrive.

I have always wondered if Mars, once exactly as far from the sun as the Earth is now, once had an entire evolutionary history identical or at least highly similar to our own. As the planet's orbit expanded and Mars moved further out in its ellipse, it became colder and lost its atmosphere.

We're talking millions of years here. The people of Mars migrated here and set up those big monolith things to influence monkey DNA, and create the human race. The Martians aren't flesh and blood beings but electromagnetic fields, and live in the chromosomatic structure we carry around. We have the illusion of being independent, but a nagging sense of predetermination. Occasionally our Martianness emerges, and we are diagnosed as crazy. But there's still a recognition, a familiarity with the behavior, the bizarre language, that allows a glimpse at our dual natures.


Woooooooo. Happy New Year, Martian brothers and sisters!