Tuesday, December 20, 2005
This jest in
I took a break from watching Danny Kaye in the Court Jester ("The chalice from the palace holds the brew that is true") to watch our own court commander on Sunday night. He was not so much in a jesting mood; between trying to talk tough about the Patriotic Act and his decision to spy on Americans without oversight from the courts and his insistence that everything was going great in Iraq, he didn't have much time to make with the jokes.
Not that he doesn't like them. Witness his bizarre double-take at the press conference the next day when he said that in most democracies people find out who won the election the next day. Ooops! Don't want to remind people of the Florida fiasco. Then there was that funny business with his executive order forbidding two-part questions, and how about the face he made when the door wouldn't open in China last month? It would have been really funny if he had walked through it and never come back. But then the Chinese would have a lot of explaining to do.
No, these days GWB can't kid with the public. He has to sound tough about spying on our citizens and he takes on the air of one telling fairy stories when talking about Iraq. But he does not sound wise and paternal; his manner is glib and perfunctory, not like your dad but like your babysitter's skeezy boyfriend who is reading a story to you while nursing a beer and hoping you go to sleep, pronto, so he can mess around. Makes you want to stay awake to see what kind of shit he's going to try. Suspicious, but not funny.
Danny Kaye, he was funny.
Monday, December 12, 2005
And you will know him by the trail of dead
Our president gave yet another speech on Iraq today and spelled out why we should be so optimistic about the war there: while 2140 American lives have been lost, over 30,000 Iraqis have been killed by US troops. That's a better than 10:1 kill ratio, which should be cause for great rejoicing in this holiday season. (Sorry: Christmas season.)
For Bush, raised on the WWF and Rambo, it should not seem surprising that we are killing ten insurgents for every one of our servicemen. Our guys can fire two machine guns at once, spinning in a circle, while ninja-like Arabs traditionally fall to the ground screaming, "Aaargh!" Unless they are blown out of the frame by a massive explosion, in which case they usually yell, "Aieee!"
In other words, bring 'em on. Except those 30,000 were civilians...
Meanwhile, the Democrats have demonstrated their ability to seize the moment, take advantage of discord over the war, by circling the wagons as in a John Ford western, allowing the GOP to play Indian for a change. It's just that their playbook needs some work.
"Okay, Murtha, I want you to go over there and set yourself on fire. Dean, stay back and gnash your teeth and moan. Pelosi, get up on top of the wagon and scream hysterically. And Lieberman, I want you to go out there and join the other side. And don't come back until everyone of us is dead!"
We're all doomed. Civilians included.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Vile bodies
Last weekend we went to see the exhibition
Bodies at South Street Seaport, a collection of dancing, jumping, running cadavers, stripped of their skin the better to let us look at their inner workings. It was just the thing for a holiday Sunday: My wife was feeling a little low, and in need of an out-of-body experience of some sort, and our daughter (who seems wedded to her cell phone and computer these days) likes anythng gross and anatomical.
The show, which has generated some controversy, was less shocking than I had expected: maybe it was all those years of looking at my big brother's Visible Man model as a kid but most of the bones and guts looked rather familiar to me -- all though I had never seen the inner workings so animated! My favorite display featured a man's skeleton dancing with his muscular system, a tango they both used to know so well.
The circulatory system, freed of its muscles, organs, and skeleton, looked like coral: red and spindly, as delicate as the etchings on a sand dollar. The diseased lungs and hearts of former smokers and heart disease victims got a lot of attention, too. The crowds were in some ways the best thing about the show. A lot of folks you won't find at the MOMA were staring intently at the complex maze of material that exists beneath our skin with faces at once repulsed and relieved: Their expressions seem to say, oh, yes, I recognize you. Imagine seeing you here.
Me, I had spent a little too much time carving a 24-lb bird a few days before to really enjoy the splayed muscles separating from the bones of the bouncing cadavers. It sure didn't make me hungry which was probably a relief to family and friends alike.
