Missives from the Hinterlands

How do you revive something long dead? Enthusiasm isn't enough. Lazarus didn't come back because his family really wanted him to. He came back because it was part of God's plan and He chose to intervene through his mortal son, Jesus. How will my divine intervention manifest itself? Or, more properly, divine inspiration. 

I don't need something to raise my blog from the dead. I have the power of resurrection in me. I just need something to make me want to do it. After all, breathing new life into an old carcass takes effort, It takes energy. Lots of energy. And it doesn't always end up well. Just ask Dr. Frankenstein...

My muse was a young, angry muse, and my young, angry days are far behind me. Maybe it's time to find an old cynical, but basically happy muse. Does such a muse exist? Maybe it's Clio's older sister. You know, the one who curses and drinks too much, cries sometimes, but laughs more often. I wonder if she has some time to spare... 

Whether my muse comes or not, I need to do something. I need to tap back into my creative side. I feel it fading, and that scares me. Creativity is vitality. One can live without it, but it is a flat, gray life, a life in which the days run together into an undifferentiated blob of existence. Creativity is the paint that provides the shades and contrast that make for a vibrant, colorful life.

When we're young, we paint with big splashes of color, always bold, often clashing. But our canvas is small and crazy colors and aesthetic choices are more containable and less "over the top." As we age our painting tends to become more more detailed, delicate and subtle. It's often more nuanced and muted because the wild approach of youth doesn't translate well to a much larger canvas. And painting larger canvases takes more energy, so much so, that it's often easier to just stop painting and let the dull comfort of entropy take control. 

But comfort does not beget art. Or at least it doesn't beget good, evocative, challenging art. In some ways it's easier to be uncomfortable when you have no choice. I don't mean that it's better to be involuntarily uncomfortable. It actually sucks, but no one can deny that it's motivating and challenging. 

So the key is to tap into the motivating pain of discomfort from a position of comfort. How does one do that and why? Well, that's what I'm back here in this old spot to figure out. 

I grew up in Alaska, and it rained a lot. Because it was often too miserable to go outside, I used to run through the house like a crazy man. Back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, up and down the stairs. It would drive my parents crazy. My poor mom would always yell at me to stop running before I broke something.

One day, during a particularly manic marathon, I knocked over a very valuable knick knack that belonged to my grandmother. It shattered beyond all salvage. Completely destroyed. I remember my mom and dad sitting me down rather forcefully and demanding to know what happened and what I intended to do about it. I cried, and shouted that it wasn't my fault, that it shouldn't have been so close to the edge, that the floor shouldn't have been so slippery. They didn't buy any of it, and I spent the whole next summer working to pay my grandmother back. It was a hard lesson, but one that I've taken to heart: don't mess around if you can't pay the price.

Despite all my protestations, the only thing I didn't say to my folks that gray September afternoon was, "fuck you, mom and dad, it's not my problem. What are you going to do about it?" I was a devious little shit, and, yet, that never crossed my mind. (Of course, I wasn't a Republican.) If I had said that, I know how they would have replied: "You broke it; you get to fix it, you little bastard."

The Repubs are hammering a new meme regarding Iraq. Whenever anyone attacks them for the war in Iraq, they shout back: "Hey, what's done is done. What the hell should we do about it, huh, Mr. Smarty Pants?" Instead of responding like my parents, the democratic leaders just hem and haw and say "boy that's a tough problem."

No shit! It is a tough problem. But it's not our fucking problem! They broke Iraq. They broke the military. They can't just turn around, shrug their shoulders and say, "well, if you're so smart, you tell us how to fix it." Oh no. It ain't like that, you little bastards, you will pick up each and every little piece out there. And you will find a way to pay for it.

We told you not to run in the house.

If you need any more evidence that our national discourse has been taken over by religious fanatics, I turn your attention to this gem from the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006775

Now, I know the Journal opinion pages are not what you'd call a balanced forum. And we've come to expect a certain winguttery from its denizens, but, c'mon, folks, it's 2005 and a main-stream paper has published a piece discussing the come-back of exorcism! That's right, devil stomping, Satan expunging, honest-to-god exorcism. And, of course, exorcism's big return is not a sign of irrational craziness. No, no, no, it's just the happy result of the "age-old hope that God will deliver us from evil." Jesus H. Christ in a dumptruck (if I may).

Revelations on NBC. Christ on the cover of Time and Newsweek. Elected officials asking Sweet Baby Jesus to strike down heathen judges. And now, a respected daily paper praising the come-back of devil wrestling. Each day, we creep closer and closer to Christian theocracy, and no one seems to care.

The Beat Goes On...

As usual, Tom Tomorrow nails it: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19060.

This country is a product of the Enlightenment and was established by secular humanists. It's very structure was intended to foster rational thought. However, the people who now control the United States are as irrational and superstitious as any medieval peasant. They hate anything that doesn't fit into their biblical world view, and they will not rest until they've stripped away the last 400 years of scientific and social development.

TERROR LEVEL RED

John Cornyn and the other anti-judiciary legislators are terrorists. They're no better than Osama Bin Laden spouting his threats from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan/Pakistan/New Jersey. (I mean, who the fuck knows where Binny is, or cares, I guess, now that BushCo has established its grip firmly on our nation's nutsack.) Sure, they couch their threats in softer terms, kind of like a mobster on a shakedown: "Of course you don't have to pay us. But, boy, it'd be shame if anything bad were to happen to you." But they're just as serious.

These wingnuts can't handle the fact that there's still a branch of government that hasn't recognized the preeminence of the little baby Jesus and his followers (who certainly know what the tyke wants for us all.) It makes their blood boil that the glorious Christian revolution keeps getting quashed by heathen bastards in black robes. Jesus can't be on the sidelines during the fourth quarter of the big game between good and evil.

Cornyn and DeLay's recent musings on the dangers of a rogue judiciary are just the start of a new assault on the liberal foundations of this country. The rhetoric will ratchet up, and the full weight of the freaks will be brought to bear against the only bastion between us and theocracy. Make no mistake, if these fuckers carry the day, we'll have our own Taliban. Sure, they'll wear blue suits and flag lapel pins instead of robes, but they'll carry the same clubs for beating the impious.

PULL THE FUCKING PLUG ALREADY...

There isn't much left to say about the Terri Schiavo fiasco that hasn't already been shouted hundreds of times.

15 years of litigation leaves little unsaid.

This morning at 6:30 a.m., yet another judge said yet again that Terri is fish food. Let's see, that's every court in Florida. Twice. And now the federal district court. Later this week, unless they've gone batshit insane down there in Atlanta, the Eleventh Circuit will affirm the district court.

That leaves the Supremes. Once again, a pivotal battle in the cultural war will be fought in the hollowed halls of D.C., and, frankly, the forces of good haven't been doin' so well there. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5-4 decision in favor of an injunction with Scalia leading the charge and Thomas raising his head from Anotnin's lap just long enough to cast the deciding vote.

"Our founding fathers were godly men," Scalia, J. will intone, "and they would have wanted that tube to keep pouring goo down Terri's throat until the last bit of her rots away. That's what respecting life means. Careful, Thomas, watch the teeth!"

It's amazing how, in the span of 5 years, we have gone from being the most respected and feared super power in the world to a goddamned, traveling circus side show. The greatest army of all time is getting its ass kicked in Iraq and the greatest deliberative body in the world practically wet itself passing the "Palm Sunday Accord" to shove a feeding tube down the throat of a vegetable.

Someone said irony died on 9/11/01. From then on, awed by the magnitude of that disaster, our country was supposed to be grown up and sober. The days of frivolity and silly games that characterized the '90s were over.

Well, irony died alright, but it didn't leave us mature and reflective. It left us compliant and incapable of separating enlightenment from lunacy.

Terri Schiavo is dead as fried chicken. Let her go.

Work sucks right now, and I barely have time to tend to my basic needs, let alone blog. However, I heard something on NPR yesterday that made me sit up and take notice, even in my current harried state.

Apparently, for the first time ever, we are sending an amputee soldier back into combat in Iraq. This is being hailed by military officials as a triumph of spirit and a ringing endorsement of our mission: "What we're doing in Iraq must be good and just because Captain Dumbshit is going back for more even after losing a leg. URAH!!" They've even gone so far as to call it a step toward eliminating disability discrimination.

As I've said many times, reality hasn't just outpaced satire, it's kicking the shit out of it.

We're running out of soldiers. First, it's the injured, then it's the aged and, eventually, it's the children. Bush in his hubris has broken the military's back, and it's unclear whether it will ever recover.