--Oh, the earth is the best! That's why I'm a vegetarian.
--Well, that's a start.
--Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan.
--I'm a level 5 vegan -- I won't eat anything that casts a shadow.
The Simpsons

If this year's newly broadened selection of Oscar nominees for Best Picture, doubled from five to ten, isn't quite as silly as the Dodo's demand that "all must have prizes", it is enlivened by the same spirit. All must have honorable mention, and any boost in video rental revenue that might accrue from it, in the hard commercial reality that is our side of the looking glass.

Perhaps the diluted field of nominees will subsequently dilute the indignation of arbiter elegantiarum and also-ran alike when the Academy, say, acquiesces to the brute force of box office by honoring the technological brilliance and treacly storytelling of Avatar, or, observing some other shadowy political consideration, declares the shopworn caricature of masculinity at war that is Kathryn Bigelow's capable but unexceptional The Hurt Locker worthiest of worthies. There are more important foci for one's outrage after all.

Speaking only for myself and having just endured Avatar with a novel combination of awe and abhorrence, I must give Mr. Cameron his due, earned by the sheer scale of his ambition and the fruits of his technical innovations. Uncle. If today's self-styled cognoscenti condition their praise (or praise mostly out of fear Cameron--or an avatar thereof--will turn up at their door in some sort of amphibious/aircraft/diving-bell plaything), tomorrow's will resurrect him in some future Next New Wave movement. Right now it's just "too soon", like joking about a recent human calamity.

Still, I protest hoarsely through this constricted windpipe: while I understand the epic expenditures of these films necessitate a simplified story that travels well from language to language, need they be so cloyingly cliched? To resort so reliably to hoary politico-sociological themes? I'm just asking. The vast back-catalogue of Western art that is our great public domain brims with basic, broad story-lines that have long ago proven their cross-cultural appeal. Pick a template and leave the demagogy to the politicians, I shout up at the colossus (only echoes answer).

Cameron's recourse to the theme of colonial capitalism despoiling a land and the wise pastoral folk intimately connected to it for his science fiction epic takes fashionable liberal misanthropy to its logical conclusion. You hate the rich? The West? White people? The male sex? Corporations? All of the above? Sluggard! We hate humans. Game, set, match.

But where does one go from here? The charitable view has Cameron merely throwing red meat (or, more appropriately, something fair-trade and/or free-range) to the censorious set to pacify them as he indulges his, and our, appetite for spectacle. It's a shopworn conceit already after all (I'm sure I recall "I don't like humans" surfacing as an epithet for this passé pose years ago among the hipsters). But what to do when, once led by the Sherpas of sanctimony to the summit of conspicuous contrition, we find the land already settled? Come back down, I implore; way too much development on Mt. Misanthrope.

But this is no answer for the ambitious. As a general in the regnant cultural empire, he must conquer new territory always, thematically as well as technologically. It matters little to the martial hero what standard he bears, as long as it bears him. So, if the noble ideal of racial equality, bogged down in the stubborn swamps of human nature, had to turn on itself and declare first that one race (guess which) should become the cathartic repository of the resentment of the rest, then finally that race as such is an illusion (created by the aforementioned "race" and its "science", thereby brilliantly adapting the shoddy narrative while keeping its villain ever in the foreground) then it necessarily follows that the species itself eventually has to fall from grace.

This we already know as the extreme boundary of environmentalism. Just as the noble ideal of equality of the races of man before God withered in the absence of God and became the perversion, and inversion, it now is, the eminently practical ideal of maintaining the environment for humanity's preservation has gone the same route. Some now proclaim humanity is the disease threatening the environment's preservation. First the White man as scourge of the globe, now the species as a whole is the great cosmic pestilence. Next up: "species" do not exist.

Forgiveness is a necessary component of the movie-going experience for all but the best directors in this cinematic Age of Indulgence. All things being equal, artistic freedom is a good thing. But when are all things ever equal? Many of today's directors would benefit from a little more harness (I know we would). Taking in a little Tarantino? Don your lead apron of lenience against the careless doctor's irradiation of idiocy. Bring a jumbo-sized tub of forbearance, salt it as necessary with resolve, and enjoy the pretty flashing pictures. Just don't confuse them with reality, or imbue them with morality.

Possession

I confess I've never been overtaken entirely by passion. I've never given myself over unconditionally and without reservation to anything; neither joy nor grief, hate nor love. Likewise for any given idea; but this is just another way of saying the same thing, for the passions are ideas too. The purest ideas, confounding transposition into mere language and only hinted at by even the most sublime art. One has to live such ideas. The poets tell us the lover, as opposed to the merely amorous, is a zealot prepared to accept death itself on behalf of the idea of love.

But for me always there is an inaccessible self-consciousness, a clinical awareness that becomes alien. There is a foreigner within narrating the varying circumstances of my existence: so this is Dennis stricken with grief; so this is Dennis afflicted by love; etc. It has taken in every tragedy or conquest, every humiliation and all the pride, unaffected. This awareness constitutes, impossible I know, a distinct entity. Another Dennis.

I've always had my suspicions about this separate consciousness that is not conscience. It's not the opposite of the conscience, but the absence of it, that part between mindless instinct and moral self-awareness. It--he--observes me as if from without. He waits for the thing, whatever it is, to end; he makes no distinctions of geography--the peak of Everest or the easy chair, it's no difference. He takes everything in with a wonder-less curiosity, and never with surprise, even as he takes note of the novelty of a given occurrence, how familiar it is, or not, how it might change the dynamic of my existence, but not really, because, he knows, it's all just protocol and convention in the end, until it all ends--and this I expect he will witness with the same idle, abstract gaze. He is impossibly inhuman.

But there he is, always, looking down on the confusion of my psyche as if through impenetrable glass. I can only dimly sense his formless presence behind the reflection I cast on the pane separating us--of me, unsentimental and unforgiving in its clarity. He sees all and records nothing; he doesn't care. He humors no vanity. He has the goods on me; he doesn't care. He taunts me with his lack of reproach for anything, great or small. He will not be run off; he can't be gotten to. His indifference is eternal, mocking, superior.

I've felt passion, of course, even "deeply", whatever that means to you. But if a man hasn't at least once been "consumed" or "blinded" by passion, whether it be love or hate (and what's the difference, in the end, between these inversions of each other?), he cannot say he knows them. It then follows that he cannot recognize them in others; he can only behave as if he understands. He knows what a thing is supposed to look like and responds accordingly, in the interests of order, but mostly out of habit. Eastern mystics of one sort or another--and I can't tell them apart--might say he is unrealized as a human being.

But a human can only be human, in part and in whole, no more or less in the depths of "inhumanity", and always. The depraved man appalls us not only for his deeds but for his irrefutable demonstration of humanity's potential for evil; it must then follow that he demonstrates for each of us our own capacity for evil, because we cannot escape the bond that is our shared humanity. With each transgression the evil expand the Devil's realm, as surely as the the great establish the uppermost boundaries of human achievement. Every iteration of a man is an argument on behalf of and proving itself; lives committed to malice, lives sacrificed selflessly or stupidly, "madmen", lives "wasted" to sloth or obsession; all are competing models of man. No man can escape the assertion that is his life; he lives as he would have everyone live. Each life is the proposition: "this is Man."

There is some sort of accommodation between the reasoning frontal lobe and the reptilian brain stem, a Faustian bargain, a grotesque, conjoined symbiosis, right here in my head. Here appetite meets abstraction. A devil's workshop fashioning rationales for base impulse. It's a bureaucracy employed in legalizing anything, as needed. But it is not immoral--that would be too human, a transgression of morality and thus a recognition of it, leaving the prospect for contrition and redemption; it is amoral. It's out of this world, man.

A Christian might call him the Devil. Popular convention calls him "detachment", a sort of psychological debilitation, an unfortunate byproduct of modern society, or of Society; a decayed capacity to feel resulting from the ease and equivocal nature of the age; a problem of too little struggle--and too much time. One convention even, ironically, blames Convention. Vanity imagines him as a superior posture. Psychology gives him one name after another, as if to coax him out by finally landing on the magic invocation; after long and total failure, this science of the mind resorts finally, crassly, to myriad refinements and specialized forms of the original, temporary solace from the alien self: the intoxication and suppression of the senses.

These answers may suffice for a time, even a lifetime, but in the end they all fall short, because they allow for some accommodation or destruction of the demon. Even the Devil cowers before God, just as we mortals do. I am witness: my demon is a constant in presence, measure, and autonomy, immutable and ageless, there from the flash of conception to a death he will likely witness with the same impenetrable indifference. But in the end he cannot be separate, even if he confounds my will to the end; he is central, he is in fact the last reducible part of me, to be resolved by fire or oblivion, as the case may be. He will not distinguish between these two, therefore I cannot. I speak only for myself, understand.

Barry Bugs Out

Tom Englehardt nails the true nature of President Obama's address to cadets at West Point:

Certainly, the choice of venue, and so the decision to address a military audience first and other Americans second, not only emphasized the escalatory military path chosen in Afghanistan, but represented a kind of symbolic surrender of civilian authority.

Rush Limbaugh's wistful musing about a military coup is more oblivious than devious: after a perfunctory, brief struggle, the coup is victorious (Of course, if the president had been arrested at West Point and replaced with a military junta, I'm not entirely sure Limbaugh wouldn't find a way to justify it. Are you?). Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if not yet nominal, Commander-in-Chief, surrendering an authority he doesn't want and wouldn't know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like the rest of us.

But it's not the president's prerogative to divest himself of command over the armed forces to avoid its political consequences--elite convention notwithstanding. The extraordinary executive power over war itself remains, insulated from legislative or judicial interference, nominally vested in an elected president, wielded by a cabal. This is dereliction of duty of the highest order. The Commander in Chief has abandoned his post to cower in the rear while his mutinous subordinates take command.

But okay, this is all retrograde and simplistic, I know. Just the sort of thing to set elite eyes rolling, like taking the Constitution and sovereignty too seriously. Let's crassly accept the "political reality" and acknowledge the asymmetry between the White House and the the military establishment :

The Pentagon dictates policy directly to the Republican Party, Fox News, conservative radio and Internet, while fighting to a draw in the contested middle that is the the unallied media.
Obama, on the other hand, leads a party divided on the war and has a more conditional alliance with a media complex--MSNBC, NPR, etc.--that is both less powerful and less subservient than their adversaries. It's no great boast, but the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character. The difference casts in relief the decadence of the Republican Party and its staunchest media organs.

Meanwhile, in the Boy Wonder's White House Joseph Biden, garrulous and glib, self-imagined Caesar to Iraq's Gaul, is what passes for a pragmatist and sage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her position the product of a previous political capitulation), known for taking flight in hectoring recrimination before the galling indignity that is the unscripted media encounter, is sent abroad to placate a resentful world. The charmless representing the clueless. God help us.

I think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and, pardon me, but there's not much chance that you're the exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country in a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you're not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that's just where the danger begins.

--The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

D'uhccuse...!

He's just saying there's nothing wrong with that.

Well, they look like a white crowd to me. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up here. No surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact. I think there's a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, whites versus other people. I think [Sarah Palin]'s very smart about this.
--Chris Matthews, television journalist

Chris Matthews' self-awareness is notoriously suspect. His analyses of the national psyche, to the extent they are coherent, typically reveal more about him than to him, and often. His random digressions branch off one after another, shedding the pungent, overripe fruit of his personal Tree of Knowledge. Around him his fellows navigate with care, watching where they step, casting nervous glances upward at the slightest sound.

Perhaps they feel some embarrassment at one of their own speaking too freely in front of the help; what's revealed is not just one man's coarse intellect, but the prejudices and delusions of an entire class. Chris Matthews can't maintain the ruse because he doesn't know it's a ruse. Still, he perpetuates it. Chris Matthews has managed to dupe himself, if no one else. Chris Matthews lacks situational awareness.

Not long ago, his undisciplined emotionalism would have been discouraged as a feminine preference for impulse over reserve; it would have been deemed unmanly. In that light Matthews' notorious masculinity fetish is neither homoerotic nor misogynist, but an honest fascination with a foreign point of view. His sexual boorishness is a failed interpretation of masculinity, lapsing into caricature. His visceral reaction to Hillary Clinton, catty.

But no one deliberately sets out to make himself a fool--unless he does it on television. Of these there are two kinds, the actor who plays the fool for our amusement and the fool who is lured before the camera, for our amusement. The most common form of the latter is the reality show participant.
Reality television democratized, ergo de-mythologized, celebrity. Distinctions are blurred in the ensuing chaos. In the post-revolutionary order professionals have ceded some local narrative control to the audience. Indeed, the spontaneous narrative that Reality television, and now "viral" Internet material, attempts is not a foreign product introduced to the people, but is generated from within them, performed by them and consumed by them. The author is the hive. Production is superfluous.

The viewer has grown used to (if not the reality, the conceit of) providing his own narrative. He is increasingly adept and accustomed to this. This is one tough crowd.
Thus the industry of television is confronted with a transfer of expertise to the audience, a sort of purchasing power; "media personalities" have less control over their media personalities. Television journalists used to be the gatekeepers of the information flow, now they are deluged along with everyone else in the flood. They have lost their monopoly on reality.

Its individuals must adapt to the new evolutionary environment; "redefine" themselves, in euphemism. The desperate scramble produces new, grotesque hybrids; shape shifters alternating between, and sometimes straddling, traditional and Reality television. No one yet understands what is happening. Reality TV aspires to surveillance of the individual by the mass; multiple raw feeds strategically located. It's a medium-specific tyranny of the majority. Professionals, once mystical creatures, have lost their former privilege. Everyone is fair game.

Matthews, like Tyra Banks or any other regular on The Soup, is a media personality less sophisticated than his audience and less aware of the nature of his performance. Chris Matthews is reality television.

The audience is no longer helpless and docile. It rebels against kitsch and manipulation. Anything introduced into the veg-o-matic of popular culture is now broken down, sampled and pilfered, recombined. The artist loses control over his work once it's released into this wild. Television's non-fictional performers are subject to this as well. The audience crafts additional or alternative narratives; unearths unintended subtexts; improvises parody of inferior work. These are defensive strategies. If we're not to be rid of them we are obliged by a sense of decency to ridicule a Tyra Banks or a Chris Matthews. One must marvel. One must not take some people seriously.

But he must consider them seriously, as symptoms of the human condition. After all, the joke is ultimately on us.
Reality television is the gallows humor of a culture self-slated for execution. The greater part of its appeal is not, as first glance suggests, the sugar-rush ridicule of one's inferiors; it's the bitter acknowledgement they are, after all, our fellows, countrymen, kin even. They are us.

You complain: Reality television shows a perversely select group. Yes; but it does not necessarily follow they're a meaner lot than the whole. After all, some are too wretched even to make it past first cut at For the Love of Ray J. How great is their number?

We may yet know. Commerce ensures new contrivances for luring their basest natures into the electronic square are even now being worked up by some of our sharpest young minds. Decent kids every one, no doubt.

Reality television has only begun charting the depths of human greed. By "greed" I mean also greed for love, status, attention. Like it or not, reality television is a valuable artifact of the present. But the ever-shifting lineup of "reality's" global community theater all manage to delude themselves in the end into thinking they are stars.

Reality TV is a living document of our decadent end. It was, after all, the poet-cum-charlatan-cum-"satanist" Aleister Crowley who declared

Every man and woman is a star

and began his "Book of the Law" with

Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law
(commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this perfectly concise, all-encompassing statement of principle).

Reality television has never been more succinctly defined. You're the star; do what you will. Here it is prefigured before television. It just as neatly sums up current popular convention. "Reality", a long time latent, has been released into the atmosphere we all share. Its intrusive nature interrogates high and low. Its endless iterations are unforeseeable. The confused persona we know as "Chris Matthews" is one measure of its progress.

The More Things Change...

From a former jar-head friend now working in Afghanistan as a contractor:

About the only thing you really need to stockpile is patience because it's a military/government project, where the sad but common saying is "f--k up, move up". You'd be astounded at the incompetence and how deep and swift it can flow through here sometimes. You remember.

I want to make an anti-Ken Burns documentary someday, for our decade's Iraq/AfPak project: over stills of soldiers in the field, accompanied by a soundtrack of melodramatic strings, a voice-over (is James Earl Jones still doing voice work?) reads letters and emails home; but instead of co-opting the chivalrous eloquence of the nineteenth century to romanticise the massacre from the comfort of our temporal remove, we get the contemporary voice and the gruesome comedy. Plain, unsentimental, profane, resigned. And a thousand times truer.

Oh, wait. It's been done:

cowardice

This is a little embarrassing.

I thought I might write my way out of here. Setting messages in virtual bottles adrift in the electronic ether. Someone would find one, send out a search party. I would finally join society, whatever that meant. I had an idea of what it was, gleaned from a lifetime of secondhand accounts warped by the demented lens of electronic media. These posts are my various attempts to mimic that, to conjure in reality what I see in representation, as, increasingly, is the whole of my behavior. I'm a one man cargo cult.

Years ago, before my self-delusion was finally spent, before I finally accepted as chosen this isolation incrementally achieved through countless retreats from various relationships to the "outside world", that is to say humanity, I thought of my existence as taking place in a darkened room. There is a door somewhere, but I can't see it. I can only grope about in the dark, walking the wall with my hands. I could not know if I was endlessly retracing the same circuitous route in a tomb, or moving down an endless hall. But as long as I had faith in the existence of the door I was alright. It would lead me out; I would have friends, lovers, enemies. I would be normal, finally. This has been the unachievable goal I've set for myself. I would be part of a greater whole, drawing strength from it, rather than a whole unto myself, consuming my own psychic innards until my hollow, gelatinous shell caves in upon itself in a rubbery heap.

But delusion fades over time. Now I know: there is no door. The darkness is mine, projected outward. I cherish the room as all I know, because it is. I don't want to leave, therefore I cannot leave. I'm going to die in here. But I do miss the idea of the door. We are all precisely where we have chosen to be.
Save yourselves.