Thor’s Day, May 29 2003

First the good news: a trip out to my online banking site shows that my latest Unemployment check has been direct deposited. I can now write a check for the June rent. Said check will pretty much entirely clear out the checking account, but still… this is a huge load off my mind for another month or so.

Spare currency, on the other hand… what we laughingly call ‘disposable income’, when we have it… is remarkably thin on the ground, but at least I won’t be homeless until July. Now, if Sondra over at the office would just find it in her heart to stick a little piece of paper on my door telling me whether I’ll still be welcome here in July or not, I might be able to relax… or just resign myself to moving in with my youngest brother Paul, one or the other…

On that subject, she told me last week I’d be getting a lease renewal form ‘next week’. We’re running out of ‘next week’ rapidly. I hate it when people tell you that you can expect something within a large temporal window, and then wait until exactly the last possible second of that potential window to get this thing to you. Why is it that ‘sometime next week’ always equates to ‘the last possible second of next week’? Why don’t people ever get something done earlier than they absolutely have to? (I do. If I have a deadline, I try to get something done a few days beforehand. If I’m supposed to get a piece of work in ‘by Wednesday at the latest’, I try to have it on my boss’ desk on Monday or Tuesday. Yet everybody else in the world seems to say things like ‘sometime next week’ with the understanding that this means ‘as late on Friday as I can possibly contrive to put it off to’.)

She’ll probably stick this thing on my door at 4:55 tomorrow evening. (And if it’s a notice to vacate rather than a renewal form, I imagine she’ll do it very stealthily and then skulk on off the premises so I don’t ruin her weekend with one of my patented hissy fits.)

On the other hand, my recollection is that two years ago, when they did hit me with a notice to vacate, they gave me 60 days’ notice, and I have some vague notion that this is, if not a requirement, then a generally understood courtesy. And it certainly would seem awfully bitchy of the management to wait until the last month of my lease to tell me I need to pack up, if that’s what they’re planning to do. So I hope they’ll just give me a new lease without a fuss (although you know the rent is going to go up, regardless of the fact that it should go down, since our water is now being metered and they’re no longer paying the bill).

Okay, I’m sorry… this is just me bitching, and I know no one ever likes to read that, and certainly no one ever comments on these things when I do, so there you have it, the social continuum in action. Many of the personal blogs I travel around to that get a lot of comments are very light hearted; people seem to like to respond to the happy shit. I just don’t have a lot of upright cheerful honkey shit to talk about right now. Sorry.

It’s early yet, so I have no idea if I’m going to get anything good in the mail today. I will note that I checked out the JoeBobBriggs site and I am not listed as a book reviewer, nor are either of my first two reviews posted yet. I’ve emailed my editor with an inquiry, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. (People answer my email when they’re damned good and ready, yet another of the many many annoying things about not being famous, wealthy, or powerful. I’m willing to bet a serious amount of money that if I ever become reasonably successful at anything that brings me some modicum of fame in some area, people will answer my emails the second they get them, and thank me fulsomely for taking the time to write to them, too. It’s amazing how fast you move up everyone else’s priority ladder when suddenly you’re a star. And what irritates me most about this is that if someone writes ME out of the blue, I answer their email immediately. I’m just like that.)

On that subject, I got an extremely intelligent, funny, unsolicited note in my Yahoo personal mailbox from a very smart, sharp, witty woman named Nadine. I loved her note and think she seems very cool and based on the one picture attached to her profile (of course) I am not even remotely physically attracted to her. (I’m also concerned because she seems to be holding a mouse on her palm and if she’s one of these ‘animals before people’ types, it’s gonna be a problem.)

And I hate that. What is it that’s wrong with our culture, that all the physically attractive people are shallow little morons? And, for that matter, what’s wrong with me, that this absolutely perfect woman writes me a note and my response is to wail like a great big brat “but she isn’t HOT, I wanna HOTTIE!!”?

But I do want a hottie, he said, petulantly. I do I do I do I do I do. Just once in my life I’d like to walk into a restaurant with some total babe on my arm and have every other guy standing around go ‘what the hell is she doing with that loser’?

Okay. Actually I’m not THAT shallow. I simply want to be involved in a relationship that is intimate in every way… emotional, psychological, intellectual, and yes, physical. Which means, I’d like to have that relationship with someone I’m physically attracted to. I can fall madly in love with women who aren’t going to be co-starring in a hot tub with Reese Witherspoon in LEGALLY BLONDE 3: IT’S SO GREAT TO BE DUMB, or whatever. In fact, I grudgingly admit that while The Infamous Jess is the most gorgeous woman in the world to me, there are a lot of guys who would probably only call her doable, at best. (And she’s too tall; I just adore her so that I don’t care.)

Ah, there’s no profit in this subject. The women I find attractive will never find me so, and vice versa; that’s just how life works, and I’m aware I’m hardly the only one this occurs to. I blame television. Or conservative talk radio hosts. Or all you idiots who actually voted for Dubya. Shame on you. See how you’ve ruined my life?

The realization that other people do not necessarily enjoy your absolutely favorite song in the world, that you are currently blasting from your car stereo at window shaking volume as you drive slowly through a normally quiet, residential neighborhood, is one that few individuals are mature, enlightened, or civilized enough to emotionally grasp. Most people can get about as far as ‘well, maybe they think they don’t like this wonderful music, but that just means they haven’t listened to it enough, let’s turn it up a little louder and they’re sure to come to appreciate it’. These emotional retardates are astonishingly annoying, but there are an enormous number of them, and in most civilized nations we are not allowed to simply drag them out of their cars and string them up from the nearest lamp post. Which may mean we desperately need to re-define our basic social covenants, at least as regards the illegality of lynching public nuisances with really really loud car radios.

And your little dog, too

Kim from Dayton, a recent correspondent of mine, wrote in response to my movie postings yesterday to ask me what the hell my problem was with The Wizard of Oz. (She didn’t put it that way, though; Kim is a class act.)

Herewith presented is my emailed response to her, which I thought some few of you might find amusing, although more likely, it will simply make every WOO fan in the universe gather together in a frenzied mob outside my patio, waving pitchforks and torches while chanting ‘beezlenut rah rah BOIL that dust speck’.

But talk is cheap when you do it through a modem. Here, then, is what I think of nearly everybody’s childhood favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz:

It's a horrifyingly bad movie. It's a bad adaptation of a great kid's fantasy, it's a bad movie entirely in its own right, it's so goddam cloyingly cutesy it makes me want to vomit just thinking about it, it stars Judy Garland who could not act drunk if you poured a quart of schnappes into her through a siphon, the characters are all morons, the songs suck, it looks terrible, the dialogue blows, the acting is resolutely bad, it has dancing midgets, the winged monkeys look stupid, and the only character I found remotely appealing in the whole film melts when she gets hit with a bucket of water.
And, ultimately, what's the message of WOO? My favorite movie in the world, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, is, admittedly, very corny and has been broadcast about a billion too many times at Christmas. But at least its message is clear: one should count wealth by how many friends one has, and success by how much one has done to help others in his or her life. I may find that message a little simplistic, but it's pretty straightforward, and it's pretty positive.
WOO is beloved by millions, and I'm goddamned if I can figure out what the hell its message is. Real life sucks because it's not in color? If something is green we're allowed to kill it, either by dropping a cottage on it or by throwing a bucket of water at it? Good People Are Pretty and Bad People Are Ugly? Or, maybe, Midgets Can't Sing And We Shouldn't Let Them Dance On TV Either?
A film doesn't have to have a point to be good, I grant you, and many bad films have messages. But WOO is a really lousy film that is also, apparently, utterly pointless.
The only reason so many people like this film is they saw it for the first time when they were 5 years old and it scared the shit out of them. However, opinions one forms in response to extreme emotional stimulus while sitting in front of the TV wearing footie pajamas are generally not particularly intelligent or reasonable. WOO is just a lousy, lousy film. And if millions of people didn't adore it, it wouldn't bother me as much as it does. But when millions of people adore crap like this (and, you know, crap like FORREST GUMP) it makes me despair for our culture.
But then, I despair for our culture a lot.

Quick! Somebody stop me before I type again.

PANEL ONE:
Man sitting in restaurant with remains of large meal on table in front of him, raising a hand to his mouth as he burps.
Man: Uurrp.
PANEL TWO:
Old West gunslinger with sheriff’s badge, sitting at another table, looks up.
Cowboy: Yeah?
PANEL THREE:
First man waves dismissively towards gunslinger, who is off panel now.
Man: Not you, Wyatt.
Cowboy: (word balloon comes from off panel) Oh. Sorry.

Saving Private Lynch

The BBC is reporting that the various Iraqi doctors and other medical personnel involved in Private Jessica Lynch’s care state that her ‘rescue’ seemed to be elaborately staged for purposes of generating the maximum melodrama. That the soldiers involved shot off their weapons when there was no need (pretty much constantly) that they refused the hospital staff’s offer of a master key to the complex and a guide to take them straight to Lynch’s location, and that, in fact, the hospital staff itself had tried to transport Lynch in an ambulance to American controlled territory the day before the raid, but the American sentries had started to fire on the vehicle when they came into range, so they’d turned around and gone back.

As a good, solidly committed invasion-opposing, Dubya-loathing, hippie-yippie left wing liberal Amerika-hating freakazoid who pretty much loathes the entire military-industrial complex en masse (while respecting a lot of the individual people within it, like my cousin Ashley), I am, at this point, pretty much duty bound to leap to my feet and vociferously support every idiotic thing the Iraqis are yowling through their BBC mouthpieces. I should denounce the American military as thugs and this infamous ‘rescue’ as a cheap piece of utterly unnecessary theatrical showboating. I should, as all my liberal left wing brethren are now doubtless doing, once more make cogent, witty references to the movie Wag The Dog, and nod, and wink, and look sagaciously down my nose at anyone who could possibly believe that the John Wayne style melodramatics of Lynch’s ‘rescue’ had any actual validity to them at all.

Here’s the thing about that. I wasn’t there. Much though I hate the military as a concept, and much though I loathe Dubya and all he stands for, and however vehemently opposed to my nation’s unprovoked, immoral, and illegal invasion of another nation I was and still am, nonetheless, I’m also an agnostic, and I have to admit, I don’t know what went on in that hospital. I’m just reading reports written by people who also don’t know what went on in that hospital, based on, admittedly, eyewitness accounts… by people who, very likely, have no reason to like the American military any more than I do (considerably less reason, actually.)

One of the Iraqi doctors even notes that while the American troops were firing their weapons everywhere, nobody was getting hurt, and he accuses the American military of using blanks. This seems kind of ridiculous to me. Pentagon spokespeople, in fact, have said it’s ridiculous, you just don’t load blanks when you charge into a possible combat zone. I have difficulty imagining anyone in my training company at Fort Benning even acknowledging such an order, or any officer ever issuing such an order. “Okay, men, we’re going to rescue a captured female soldier from an objective that, an hour ago, was held by heavily armed enemy troops. We don’t know exactly where she is or what’s been done to her, but we’re not leaving without her. Now… load blanks in your weapons. And if they offer you any kind of help or a master key, refuse it, we want this to look really really dramatic.”

Yes, Colonel. Right away, sir. This is me loading blanks into my weapon, sir. Oh, they look a lot like live rounds? Well, the new blanks are like that, sir. They do look just like live rounds. Don’t worry about it.

In fact, I’m wondering exactly where Our Army At War would just happen to come across blank M-16 ammunition in the middle of a live CZ. Every ounce of weight, every square inch of space, on a massive troop deployment is carefully accounted for. Somebody actually used some of that space and weight capacity on BLANKS? When they could have carried BULLETS? That, you know, actually WORK? That’s… that’s… well, I want to see the armorer’s log where that was listed, I really do.

I will note two subjective responses to what I’ve read, in addition to the one above:

(a) The Iraqis sound kinda whiney to me. Their complaint seems to be that when Special Forces troops stormed a hospital that had, only an hour before their arrival, contained a great many armed and uniformed enemy troops, they weren’t very polite. Apparently, a lot of big burly aggressive men armed to the teeth hurling themselves into their hospital without warning scared the Iraquis inside shitless. Now, I don’t blame them, I’d have been turning my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory, too, in the deathless words of Teddy DuChamp. But these rather plaintive accounts don’t mention anyone dying, or even getting hurt, in the assault… and I’m going to assume that if so much as one noble Iraqi medico had picked up a scratch from diving under a bedpan too fast, it would be mentioned forty seven times in five paragraphs. So I’d call this a triumph of restraint on the part of the rescuers, given that, you know, Special Forces troops aren’t exactly trained in diplomacy.

(b) Disturbingly… because honestly, the notion that our troops carried blanks into combat is simply completely deranged… the Pentagon spokesperson who denied these reports did so by lying. One of the things they claimed made the ‘they were firing blanks’ observation stupid was that M-16s need a special attachment to shoot blanks, and none of those attachments were seen in any of the video taken during the rescue. Plus, those attachments take time to attach and remove, and you can’t fire real bullets with them on your weapon, and it would simply be ridiculous to expect troops in combat to have to unscrew an attachment before they could make their weapons effective at need. And all that is more or less true, except that M-16s do not need blank suppressors to fire blanks.

The purpose of blank suppressors is to keep the discharge of a blank cartridge from being dangerous. We had them on our weapons all through Basic Training. The M-16 will fire a blank just fine without a blank suppressor on it (I saw a range sergeant detach the blank protector from a recruit’s rifle and use a blank to blow a large snake into two quivering pieces so I know this is true).

What most people don’t understand (I didn’t until I went to Basic) is that blank cartridges are not harmless. They are simply rounds of ammunition with the actual bullets (the projectiles meant to be propelled by the explosives in the round) removed. The explosive is still there in the shell, and it still goes off, and when it does, it creates a focused burst of heat plasma and compressed air that spikes out of the barrel of the gun and is quite dangerous for a distance of from six inches to maybe three feet in front of the barrel. Our drill sergeants told us over and over again that blanks were dangerous, and after Basic Training was over, I once mentioned to an acquaintance of mine who was very knowledgeable with firearms that I had seriously contemplated taking my blank suppressor off during Basic, sneaking up behind my chief tormenter in my training platoon (a complete dick with ears named Armstrong), putting the muzzle of my weapon an inch behind his head, and discharging it. My acquaintance told me I’d have certainly profoundly fucked Armstrong up and would almost certainly have killed him, and given the way that snake blew into two pieces from being ‘struck’ with a blank discharge, I believe him. (My acquaintance also told me that had I done that I’d still be sitting in a cell in Leavenworth, and maybe he’s right. I suspect even a lousy lawyer could have got me off on insanity, though. Anyone who knows me at all also knows that for me to seriously consider murdering someone else, even a dick with ears like Armstrong, I’d have to be in a severely altered state of consciousness.)

Anyway, the military uses blank suppressors to keep recruits from hurting themselves or each other with blank rounds. The M-16 does not in any way ‘require’ a blank suppressor in order to fire blanks. That’s just a blatant lie.

Which bothers me a lot. Why would our military lie, unless…?

Private Lynch, demonstrating remarkable intelligence, continues to state that she has no memory of any events of the actual rescue. Good for her. If I’d been at the center of a military operation that the brass were lying about (as I know they are, in at least one small but puzzling respect) I damned well wouldn’t remember anything that had gone on, either.

Give me one last chance
and I’m gonna make you sing
give me half a chance
to ride on the waves that you bring
you’re honey, child, to a swarm of bees
gonna blow right through you like a breeze
give me one last chance
we’ll slide down the surface of things

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man