The Aerie
My publisher seems to think that just because I've been watching three TV series simultaneously, I must have too much time on my hands.
He is of course correct.
However, that will be changing shortly.
First I picked up a one-day job next Tuesday, for which I am profoundly grateful. The money was going to go a long way towards staving off insolvency. Then, just this evening, I picked up a two- or three-week assignment at a good rate. Knock the two jobs together, and I just may be able to pay the mortgage for another month.
Not too bad. Meanwhile, work continues apace on picking up some kind of management position, and this will allow me the time to complete that process properly.
I'm quite pleased, especially since I didn't do anything to gain this work - just posted on Monster and replied to the e-mails. I'm also aware that I'm lucky - not every body has work calling them up. On the other hand, 25 years of deliberate effort has gone into that luck, so I guess that makes it all an accomplishment.
On top of all of this, another surprise today. My wife and I had signed the kids up for the youth group at church (yes, I'm an atheist who goes to church - long story). We thought that this also signed them up for the weekend retreat coming up Friday. However when she called to check on the details she found that they were not signed up - we had managed to miss the registration details sent by mail. (Gosh, I wonder how? Could it be that our home is a mess? Heaven forfend!)
Anyway, we were told it was now too late for them to sign up. The church had had to give a final count to the camp on Monday and that was that.
Well, I'd put a lot of work into convincing my eldest son that he was going on this darned trip, and by gum I wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. So I called up the camp that hosts the retreat and asked about adding people to the final count. I figured if they got a certain fee-per-attendee, why would they turn down two more if we were willing to cover the cost?
"No problem!" It was as I thought, in fact they were quite willing to accept a couple late filers.
I tried to call the organizers at church to notify them of this policy, but I couldn't seem to reach them at their desks and I didn't trust them to return my calls on time for Friday's trip. So I drove over.
Sure enough I caught the two women in their shared office, suspiciously close to those unanswered telephones. I explained that we had been confused by the process, and wanted to sign our kids up to attend.
"You were confused by the two mailings? With the notification requiring registration?"
I nodded, giving them the vacuous stare of the easily-confused. Believe me it wasn't hard.
"Well, we had to give a final count..."
"...to the camp, yes," I finished. "So that's the sticking point? The final count?"
"Well, yes..."
"So you're both fine with it though right? I mean, if it were up to you?"
"Well, of course..."
"Great, because I already talked to Sharon out at the camp, and she said it would be no problem."
Ha! By their stunned looks, I could tell that my parry and riposte had struck a point! NOW I had them! The twins were as well as packed, and once we stuck our youngest in a kennel the wife and I would have a relaxing weeken...
"There's just one problem," one of them said, a cunning look in her eye. "We're already short one chaperone on the boy's side, and you'd be adding one more boy to the mix."
But I wasn't about to let them trick me out of a weekend alone with the missus. Nope, those twins were going on that trip, and I wasn't about to let the lack of a chaperone trip me up. I immediately volunteered to chaperone.
Ha! So the twins will be off to camp, and the wife and I can drop off our youngest with Grandma, leaving just the two of us alone at home for a relaxing weeken...
Hey, waitaminute.
Okay, so I have no idea where that came from. Sat down to write about something else entirely, and suddenly this gigantic screed jumped out of my fingers and onto the web. I usually eschew politics on here, because frankly the world needs another political blog about as much as New Orleans needs another hurricane.
But... nope. Won't say it. Don't get me started.
No, we'll just talk about TV.
To segue to the completely banal, I've been catching up on back-episodes of "Lost" recently. During time that I should have been using for constructive purposes.
I had no interest in "Lost" when it aired last year, but then someone described it to me as "the best science-fiction show on television," so I had to look into it. I had no idea it had any science-fiction elements, I thought it was just a drama about survivors of a plane crash.
I find it... nice. Pleasant. Not terribly compelling, but certainly palatable. In some senses it suffers from the inevitable predictability of the TV genre, in other senses it is pleasantly innovative. The episodes vary from 'serious' episodes which chase down The Mystery of the Island, to 'character' episodes which chase down The Mystery of Character X's Background, to 'break' episodes, in which all such serious stuff is set aside and we get to see a bit of character development and interaction. In that way it is similar to other "long story" programs that have evolved since 'Babylon 5' and its multi-year plot arc.
I can't say it strictly qualifies as 'science fiction.' While mysterious events happen on this island, there are no "science fiction' elements to them. At least not yet. So far it's a mystery with elements of the fantastic, but it doesn't seem to have any elements to make it 'science fiction.' I suppose I could devote a whole different blog entry to what makes science fiction rather than occult or fantasy. That would probably be more interesting than this one!
But it suffers by association with "Survivor," because as an old Survivor fan, it's easy to see that the characters on 'Lost' do not get grimy or hungry enough for realism. After watching 20 episodes of 'Lost,' I find myself balking. Why is everyone just sitting around? Why aren't their clothes filthy? How does the Rough Handsome Devil always have exactly the same length of beard stubble? By Day 20 of 'Survivor,' the castaways look like sunburned hobos: the 'Lost' castmembers look like a prep school vacation.
Speaking of 'Babylon 5,' I was very pleasantly surprised to see Mira Furlan guest-starring as Ben Gunn. On 'Babylon 5' Mira played Delenn, an alien who undergoes a transformation to half-human. I hadn't followed her career since then, and it was nice to see that she had a role in a successful mainstream program like 'Lost'. Inasmuch as one can tell from talk-show appearances and Internet comments, Furlan seemed to be a nice person and a hardworking actress.
Unlike 'Lost,' watching episodes of the first season of '24' are not "nice" or "pleasant." They're very upsetting. Not to say it isn't an interesting and exciting program - it's just that I'm tense enough without watching a series of seven-minute cliffhangers followed by a 41-minute cliffhanger. The first season didn't seem to have totally hit its stride: the series seems to wrap up after 14 of the 24 hours, and then starts over again with some really implausible nonsense like a case of "dissociative amnesia," and a seemingly never-ending supply of sinister Serbian assassins.
My favorite scenes are those in which a character is resting after being awake for 36 hours and they are awakened. I've been there, done that. If I was awakened after one hour of sleep following 36 awake, I wouldn't be fighting or even running from sinister Serbian assassins. I'd be laying there hoping they'd shoot me.
'Lost' premieres Wednesday, by which time I hope to have caught up on the program. '24' doesn't debut until January, so I'm thinking by then I may have been able to slog through four seasons of the show (or is it five?) I'm not sure if I can actually STAND to watch five seasons of '24,' but at least at this point I get the idea of what the show is about.
The other program I've been watching is the new 'Battlestar Galactica' from the Sci Fi channel. Wow, talk about a difference. The old TV series, starring Lorne Greene, was the epitome of crap, with horrid effects, scenes shot in basements, and actresses in disco outfits. Worst was this kid called "Boxy" and his robotic dog. Even in my science-fiction-starved adolescence, I couldn't stomach the program.
So I had no expectations at all for a remade "Battlestar Galactica." I figured it was just Boomers re-treading their pasts.
Wow, was I wrong.
This "Battlestar Galactica" takes the basic plot of the original - a 12-planet human civilization overthrown by its robotic servants - and actually takes it seriously. The new series has its flaws, but many of them are endemic to series programming - episodic pacing, fluffy 'break' episodes, etc - but by and large it's grim, it's uncompromising, and it really looks hard at the question of how desperate the refugees in such circumstances would be. It's really about as good as science fiction TV can get.
I haven't watched this much TV in years, but then I've been on vacation for almost three months now, so I guess I'm due. Pretty soon I'll be working again, and then TV will return to its dusty back shelf... for now, I guess, just enjoy...
It's tempting to ask, "How much longer can this go on?"
I spoke tonight with a friend in my writing group, and he described a recent meeting he had with the leader of a local facility that offers job training to released felons. The leader is apparently a devoted Bush Republican who voiced the opinion that, given the vibrant, robust economy, it was impossible for someone who wanted a job to fail to get one.
A bit later it became clear that Republicanism isn't his only religion, but that part of the job training that HE was carrying out involved bringing participants into his faith.
BLIND IDEOLOGY
It's blind ideology, to me. It's no different than Stalinist Communism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution of German National Socialism. Rather than facing reality and finding actual but complex solutions, people seem to like to come up with a simple idea which they believe OUGHT to work, and then simply insist that it DOES work without regard for reality or evidence. Anyone who questions the ideology is actively working against the ideology and must be rejected: evidence that counters the ideology must be rejected.
As idealogues have always done, they believe personal morality is intrinsically bound to the ideology, to success, and even to one's humanity. If you fail, you must be immoral and therefore not part of the idealogy: if you are part of the idealogy you are moral, and therefore you must succeed. If you believe that the economy is robust, you will therefore get a job: if you fail to get a job, it is evidence that you are morally bankrupt, not fully human, and therefore deserve your failure and your suffering. Compassion is not necessary for those who are not part of the ideology.
CULTISM
I had a friend once who got involved with a cult - it was a weird cult that centered around selling knock-off perfumes. They practiced the same things: anyone who questioned her 24-hour-a-day devotion to the program was jealously trying to sabotage her success. She was told protect herself by cutting off communications with anyone who questioned her involvement. After being exploited for about a year she finally came to her senses and left, and described to me how fear and shame were used to control her.
And so you have our federal government, which as far as I can tell seems to be involved in the same kind of cultism. For this administration, doubt is disloyalty, and loyalty is certainty.
The other day when FEMA director Mike Brown stepped down, President Bush was caught by surprise by his move. I think I know why. And it's not merely because he's a willing figurehead president, only told what is necessary for his role. It's because while Brown was criminally incompetent, he remained loyal. As long as you remain loyal to this administration, you can remain in it no matter how incompetent the evidence shows you to be: look at Rumsfeld.
So when something - a shred of conscience maybe - compelled "Brownie" to resign, it of course struck Bush as absurd. Sure the guy screwed up - hey, who doesn't lose a city now and then? - but there was no reason for him to leave. He was still loyal!
Amidst all this cultish groupthink it's hard not to wonder, when will they break out the grape Kool-Aid? And who will drink it?
GOVERNMENT BY IDIOTS, THUGS, MADMEN AND THIEVES
I mean, the way I see it, here's what we have so far:
1) Our president is clearly a fool and a figurehead. He's canny enough to do what he's told, and not much more. History is littered with regimes run into the ground by idiot princes, and this is just another one.
2) Dick Cheney - a crude, foul-mouthed man with the singular focus of stealing as much money from this nation as possible through Halliburton and the oil companies, and hence back into his own pockets.
3) Karl Rove - a brilliant propagandist entirely devoid of conscience, whose only interest is in the maintenance of power... and who considers this a strength.
4) Rumsfeld - a mediocre tactician whose only military gift seems to be an unflappable persistence, also entirely without a conscience.
5) Tom DeLay - a classical example of a purely crooked politician.
These and others work for and with a whole raft of organizations such the Heritage Foundation (paid for by Scaife) and the wealthy corporatists including Big Oil and the Military-Industrial Establishment. All any of them wish to do is to simply steal this nation blind.
They already control the military. They control the executive and legislative branches of government. And with two openings on the Supreme Court, they soon will have control of the judiciary as well. And they have seized control of the major media in order to keep their theft as quiet as possible.
MOTIVATIONS OF THE MAD
None of them care about anything except their own greed. They aren't even idealistic enough to pretend to be revolutionaries. They are simply sucking every penny out of this nation and into their own pockets, without regard for the future at all. They don't appear to be able to imagine the welfare of their own children or grandchildren, except as a kind of vague future defined by their own success.
Maybe some are naive enough to take for granted the planet's ecology or the institution of the United States. Maybe some are cynical enough to not care if either or both of these things fail, assuming that they will be above such crises within their private enclaves. Maybe some are actually so ideologically narrow that they believe that by holding to their ideology everything must work out fine, at least for them. And maybe some are just plain insane and are simply whooping it up while waiting for The Rapture.
Drink helps create drunks. Gambling helps create addicted gamblers. I think it's about time that we recognize that vast wealth helps create people who are addicted to accumulating wealth. Some crazy people hoard trash - other crazy people hoard money. Not all who are wealthy are mad, but enough of them are mad that it's about time the problem is treated rather than celebrated.
WHERE IS IT HEADED?
I think the fable of the Emperor's new clothes is wrong - I think that after the boy pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes, he was stoned to death by an angry mob led by his parents, who feared guilt by association.
I wonder how long our national facade of normalcy can be maintained. How long it can go on before enough of Bush's supporters are forced to recognize that their Emperor has no clothes?
But then I look at the Soviet Union - as corrupt and mismanaged as any - which persisted even as its conscripted soldiers died in the Afghanistan debacle, and people queued for hours for basic necessities, and despair and hopelessness gripped the nation. Will Americans allow themselves to sink so low? We like to pretend we are better than that - that independent American spirit would prevail where Russia's supposed cultural acceptance of oppression allowed for years of exploitation. But I wonder if we have become such a comfortable nation that we will fool ourselves. "Yes, it's bad, and I'd work for change except, well, Survivor is on..."
CULTIVATING DISCONTENT
Coincidentally, even as one of my writing group colleagues was speaking with a pro-Bush felon-release trainer, another friend in my writing group is training felons as part of a separate program. In this case, she is helping former meth addicts work on job skills. Her comment illustrated another problem that this nation is developing: "Do you know how impossible it is for felons to get a job?"
The quarter-century old failure called the War on Drugs has created a broad class of people whose felony background is due to drug use or trade, rather than violent crime (that is, not violent drug users or violent drug dealers). This underclass is fixed: in many places felons cannot vote and/or hold public office, so they cannot change public policy. (This is to point out a fact, not challenge the general advisability of this policy). If felons are unemployable and cannot get work, they will likely become angry and lose hope. Rome was sacked by terrorists from outside her borders, but America may be felled by growing its own terrorists. By unnecessarily adding to the permanent, angry, hopeless underclass, the War on Drugs has set up a perfect petri dish for domestic and foreign terrorist recruitment. There will always be a criminal underclass, but the War on Drugs has swelled its ranks without reducing drug use or treating drug victims.
RACE VS CLASS
We've been distracted from this and other class issues in a number of ways. First, for many decades our class issues have been masked by race. Instead of speaking of the hardships of the poor, we've spoken of blacks, latinos, whoever. Divide and conquer: play the minority groups off against each other, and play the whites off against everyone else, and nobody will notice that it's really a war of the rich against the poor.
Second, "class" terminology has been expunged from our language in a very Orwellian manner. Try talking about class, and you're immediately discredited as a Socialist - a political philosophy that those controlling this nation have tried to brand as "dead." You're not only out of fashion, but your efforts are doomed if you use class terminology.
And of course, there's the cult of victimhood. The winner, the propagandists have learned, are the ones who cry "victim" first and loudest. So the right-wing media complains of the oppression by the mythical left-wing media.
The religious claim to be oppressed by the atheists and humanists. This despite the fact that there are a number of religous broadcast and cable television channels, but as far as I know absolutely no "humanist" channels. Playing the victim, the religous will claim that any non-religious channel is by definition an oppressive humanist channel. Billy Graham is regularly broadcast on prime time - when was the last time you saw an atheist broadcast during prime time? Do you even know of an living atheist as famous as Billy Graham? But the religious claim oppression.
So in the culture of victimhood, the wealthy are the first to cry "class warfare" or "class hatred" anytime class emerges in a discussion - even as the Federal Minimum Wage remains fixed at 1997 levels.
And since they ARE the rich, their voice is heard much more loudly than the voices of the poor.
It goes on and on. This country is controlled and exploited by the wealthy and powerful.
HOW LONG CAN THIS GO ON?
Will the USA go the way of the Soviet Union, and how long would that take? Will individual states decide that they are paying more federal taxes than they receive in benefits, and decide to opt out?
Or will nature catch up first? Will the next hurricane immerse Washington D.C.? Will the oceans rise to engulf lower Manhattan?
Will the people rise up spontaneously? Will a leader emerge who can voice some national vision of a better America?
Or will the madmen seize hold - the military take over, or some religious charismatic seize power?
Will George Bush be followed by Jeb, to be followed by George following the repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment?
Or will the system work? Will we somehow emerge from this present Dark Age of ideology, propaganda, and corruption and find a means to repair the damage that we're doing to the nation and to the world?
DESPITE A RECORD OF FAILURE
Four years after 9/11 Osama bin Laden is still free. Nobody even remembers the Anthrax Mailer anymore - or the fact that all of his targets were Democrats. The economy is about to take a horrid nosedive, repeating the high-oil-price high-inflation days of the 1970's. Halliburton stole $8 billion dollars in Iraq and got off scot-free, and was just awarded the no-bid (read: was handed by Dick Cheney) the contract to rebuild New Orleans. Pat Robertson blames Ellen Degeneres for Hurricane Katrina and calls for the assassination of the President of Venezuela... but remains influential. And his "Operation Blessing" charity was promoted by FEMA as a charity recipient following Hurricane Katrina, even after his "Operation Second Blessing" charity was revealed to be funneling donations into Robertson's own diamond-mining company.
Despite records of failure and corruption, the powerful remain in power and the population does not seem terribly concerned about taking that power back.
NO ANSWERS
These things don't inspire hope. These things all seem symptomatic of a society in the grip of madness, on the verge of collapse.
Will it get better? Will it get worse? How long can this go on before it collapses?
I don't know.
I was interested to see some of the new fall shows, one of which was "Prison Break." The story (from the previews) seemed to be about a man who deliberately committed felony bank robbery and got caught, in order to break his brother out of jail.
I missed the premiere, but tuned in to the second episode by accident and caught the summary from the first week. It ended with a scary scene: a bunch of guys in a shed were holding down a fellow in a shed, and threatening to cut off one of his toes with garden shears.
"Ugh," I thought, "I'm glad I didn't see that..."
Then after a brief announcement the show began.
Men. Shed. Shears.
>SNIP!<
Blood. Pain.
>Click<
So much for that show!
I don't know, what were they thinking? Do people really want to watch torture? Maiming? Blood?
Criminy, bring back the Roman Colisseum...
Then tonight I've got The Biggest Loser playing while I'm working. Now, okay, I don't know why I'm watching this show in the first place, but then it comes to the weigh off.
Now, when the women weigh off, fine - they take off their shoes, climb on the scale, no problem.
Then the guys go up there. They take of their shoes... and then take off their shirts!
Now, first of all that's just wrong for a lot of reasons. If the girls have to wear tops, the guys should have to wear tops, just from the point of view of fairness.
But more to the point, well... these guys should NOT be taking off their shirts, except in the absolute darkness of a small, sealed room buried underneath Kitt Peak. Some of these men weigh 400 lbs and not one of them has ever waxed in his life.
>Click<
So I'll fire up my audio player and turn off the TV and that will be just fine with me. I guess there are people in the world who are supposed to be encouraging viewers to watch television. None of them seemed to be at work on these programs...