back from japan

Tim, the guy next to me, made putters for a living in West Palm and was completely non-plussed by the massive turbulence just off the coast of Siberia while I stared straight ahead, yet again, and mouthed "Hail Mary"s, ten hours to go. When I got back I kept hearing about some deal for docks that made it sound like terrorists were about to buy into our infrastructure so they could smuggle in dirty bombs and anthrax but so far as I can read it doesn't seem like this is the case. So now the Democrats are fear-mongering? Is there not one government official who can simply represent, to the best of her ability, her constituency and try to do right by them? Instead of this constant wave of manipulation?

I hate being afraid of flying, what would Gus Grissom think? Here's a quote from Gus:

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
-Gus Grissom (John Barbour et al., Footprints on the Moon (The Associated Press, 1969), p. 125.)

Goddamn Gus, he truly had the righteous stuff..."the conquest of space is worth the risk of life", how many people still believe that beautiful thought? Probably people would do their Derrida and worry about use of the word "conquest" and mumble that it indicates streaks of imperialism and is typical of cold war blah blah blah, but Gus knew it was just about the willingness to explore past fear. There's your fucking conquest.

And so I was sitting on the plane sick of myself thinking about Gus Grissom and wondering if this was actually a civil war starting in Iraq or just another belch of violence so when I got home I thought I should go to antiwar.com where I found the reassuring news that civil war or not, things are not just beginning to suck more but they've been sucking more for awhile now, from Stars and Stripes (Feb. 25):
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More than 550 attacks took place in Iraq from Aug. 29, 2005, to Jan. 20, 2006, according to the latest “security and stability” report the Defense Department is required to send lawmakers every four months.

Speaking to Pentagon reporters Friday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs said that the survey’s conclusions “were not good,” but that “loving us is not what it’s about.”
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So civil war or not, that would just be another feather in our cap of suck we've managed over there. And in a cab to Alphabet City with the city a string of pearls to my right I began to really sweat because the cabbie had the news station on and they said our fearless fear-mongering president was taking another look at health care and that his trusty shotgun sheriff of a veep was looking at making Russia an enemy again because why not? We need more enemies because doesn't it say something in the bible about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer? Well, hell, it should and Russia's been playing it loose with the liberty stuff under Putin and from what I understand Jesus is about freedom for people like us and the Russians aren't like us, that's for damn sure, communist just under the skin, so we gotta watch out for them, they're like caterpillers and it's spring. And those butterflies are red. So the veep is re-writing our contact rules with Russia but that's good because the terrorist movies coming out aren't as good as Top Gun because you have to be careful and the terrorists always turn out to be bank robbers and anyway, more of our spies speak Russian.

Back briefly to this UAE deal to take our ports and smuggle bombs into our country. Wait, so they made diplomatic relations with the Taliban?!? You mean like our allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia? And so the terrorists flew out of a central Middle Eastern hub?!? One that houses the headquarters of Ford? Should Ford pull out of the UAE right now!?!? I mean, Dubai is just a bunch of Arab terrorists.

So should Johnson and Johnson, FedEx, Motorola, Lockheed-Martin and all the other firms there. If some terrorists passed through there and weren't captured, what the hell is Portland, Maine's excuse? You mean they have a big airport in the UAE? I want to fight the Bush regime whenever I can. But the grounds for resisting this deal can only be made on different philosophical grounds, if you believe in capitalism, this deal is just a deal of the rich and the rich. Worse deals happen here everyday, in terms of impact on the American people. Get angry about bank fees, they impact you much more, everyday. Not the fact that some rich Arabs are making deals with rich Americans in the economic stratosphere where access is limited to the seven, eight and nine zeroes club.

Meanwhile they're about to make it harder for consumers to shop for airline tickets because the airlines are upset that people can compare prices, so their lobbyists are getting their congressmen to start getting a bill together that will allow them to obfusicate the charges incurred in airports and the hell with you and me because you and me don't have what they have, and we'll see how well our freedom is defended then. You know, our freedom to know things like how much it will cost to go home and see mom. American things like that. Seeing mom. But damn if we won't cut the Arabs out of making the same money we let Europeans and Japanese make, because their Arab and Arabs don't believe in Jesus and who the hell knows what the Japanese believe in but the shrines are pretty and they don't hijack airplanes like the Arabs. All the Arabs. Let's out McCarthy McCarthy and while we're getting the Reds and Arab sympathizers out of the universities (a growing movement for "affirmative action" for the very repressed class of conservitives found in such tomes as "America's 101 Most Dangerous Professors" which doesn't worry about Holocaust deniers but does charge quite a few thinkers with being feminists); let's just get the Arabs out because it's important, if they're going to be our enemies, to not give them any more money.

We'll have to put up a barb-wire fence around Brighton Beach and rename it a bay by the by. Guantanimo and Brighton and if you want to talk about habeas corpus why don't you speak English you terrorist-lover pinko?

The Democrats seem cool with it because they got to prove they're macho and that they don't like terrorists either. If all these goddamn wusses didn't like terrorists so much things would be ok. And God forbid running against a fascist who can accuse you of loving terrorism when he loves freedom. We all love our freedom so much that thank God we don't need it for our beliefs. Squeaky clean and hating terrorists. I like warm beds, oceans and chocolate. I hate mosquitos, garbage and terrorists. The whole debate about trying to stop terrorism is made up and fought through images and ideas created by those images. Any real policy discussion does not exist because it doesn't fit into the structure of a campaign cycle. And who wants to actually differentiate himself and inject subtlety into the debate. Subtlety can be spun and wasn't it the great democrat Cromwell who said "subtlety can deceive you, integrity never will"? Well, we got all kinds of integrity making decisions of policy. Can I please have some subtlety, the joy of distinction?

The thing is, it took a real human being to fucking explore space, to put his ass right there on top of a rocket full of rocket fuel and go see what it was like up there, and he knew exploration was the everything, meanwhile more and more of us seem to be heading for the bunker and only leaving with guns firmly in hand; Gus was alone up there and he knew, you go up there against yourself, the conquest was to make a thing your friend. It's not a man and a gun, it's not Shane. No gun. What good is a gun anyway? I keep thinking of this soldier in Gunner Palace, "I don't think ... anywhere in history has someone killed someone else and something better has come out of it. It's just ... not possible." Gus went to war, he signed up against the fascists and the communists but in the end that was all noise against the silence above. For the truly righteous there is something beyond looking tough or even worried about being tough, it's about knowing what's truly at stake.

For awhile, after World War II, Gus flipped burgers and thought about "what comes next", next was space; I doubt he would have held his death against the stars. Because the correct answer to the question of what to do after tragedy is not "go and hide" or "point fingers" or "attack a country that has not provoked us with the absolute arrogance that because we're who we are everything will work out exactly as we expect it and everything will be better for everybody". The correct answer is engage, explore. Pretty much everybody thought Gus Grissom would be the first man to walk the moon, and, as his words indicate, he would have wanted to be the last man to stand in the way of humanity walking on the moon and exploring the vast domain of Creation. Two years later another Midwesterner walked the moon instead. Two years after the tragedy of 9/11 some shithead wore a flightsuit and said everything was ok, the mission was accomplished, what mission exactly? And now, three years after that, whatever jumbled ideas of mission, empire, money and idealism that shithead has are firmly and seriously fucked and this is a nation bereft of curiosity and the true idea of the higher, making decisions apparently on deluded ideas of security and machismo, you know, "traditional values". The Calvinistic streak of our nature has won out, what God we see is an invention entirely of the human and the moon is just the moon. God a self-help book, His ways easily understood to those who believe exactly like they're supposed to.

Go Cubs.

I'm about to go and catch up on the spring training reports, in other words, I'm about to call Corms.

Just a final note, in the pictures, you'll see "The Annunciation" by Turner. And one of Audrey in Rome.