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Aurora: What We Miss in the Rush for Comfort

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 9:56 pm in Culture, LIfe | 1 comment

Nothing could be more natural in the face of the unassimilable loss that is Aurora than the call for us to come together or the exhortations from our leaders that we are so much stronger than the violence wrought against us. Psychologically, these moments of communal affirmation may well be essential. They reduce suffering and trauma. They are welcome.

So what I’m emphatically not saying is that such appeals to our sense of community and our common bonds should be diminished or silenced. Yet a thought experiment might be worth trying. What would happen if in the wake of the next horrific shooting (it’s coming, by the way: these are now part of the structure of American life) the calls for community, for coming together, were left aside? What would happen if we were to experience the next brutality separately and alone? No appeals for communal outpouring of aid. No praise for our resilience. No calming words about how much stronger we are than the they of evil.

I’m not here to suggest what would happen—because in fact no one knows. That’s why it’s a thought experiment. Offered here is a purely speculative effort at imagining what might happen—no more than that.

Imagine then our thought experiment in action: a terrible shudder of violence has just unfolded, but in this case not followed by the usual declarations about our communal strength. Given no consolation, left to fall downward on and on in our separateness, alone with the jagged mechanism of our isolate thought, down into the dark cloud field that such violence actually opens in us, we might finally sink into a hostile landscape of pure individuality, recourseless, fearful, enraged, destructive—detached and bereft.

This possibility is what makes responsible leaders rush to speak up for community in the face of such tragedies. And it’s no joke. Alone we would be turned over to the demons. But here’s where the thought experiment comes in. What if, in this fading away of the communal, an illusory and even mythic sensation of our togetherness were torn away too? What if in this painful moment of truth we were actually able to see ourselves as we really are? In other words, what if we were to have a genuine experience of our every-man-for-himself society? Who knows where such a revelation would lead. The thought experiment doesn’t require that closure. But it does seem to open up the possibility of a terrifying experience of our reality.

Or another outcome, less apocalyptic this one, more optimistic: what if an experience of our isolation and pure individuation actually led to a deeper and more authentic hunger for genuine community—perhaps even (and here the optimism flies over the moon) to some recognition that community is more than a feeling. It requires structures. It must arise out of our way of life, instead of being a coping mechanism only pressed into service when someone has once again enacted the mass murder script on the American stage.
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Some would perhaps follow this line of reasoning through another question: how is it that we live in a society in which isolated young men can purchase an arsenal of weaponry, ammunition, and perhaps explosives, with impunity, with no oversight? And the thought occurs: perhaps if we did not rush so quickly headlong into consolation, this question might be cleared of its categorical political baggage. Even some of those who rushed out to buy guns after the election of the nation’s first black president might just suffer a moment’s reconsideration, once the consolations and intensities of groupthink were denied them.

Or instead—left to brood alone about the meaning of such an attack—maybe we’d follow our thinking in erratic directions, into taboo territories. Consider for example the clear prohibition against asking what Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies had to do with the killings. With no one to shout us down (and maybe this is isolation’s unique value) we might, some of us at least, entertain thoughts about why it was the Batman saga that the killer chose as the setting of his mayhem.

This is not to advocate for the idea that the film goaded the killer into action. It’s to suggest that thinking about violence in our society and in the products that entertain us might be fruitful. Nolan himself issued a statement following the shootings. “The movie theater is my home and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.” But what if Nolan’s film itself violates that ‘hopeful and innocent place’? Having not seen the new film, I obviously can’t comment on it—but I did see the 2008 movie that preceded it. One man’s reaction: I found it to be an appalling jumble of contradictions that finally cohered into an ugly justification—after buildings fell in clear reference to the 9/11 attacks—for vigilante violence and torture.

I realize many will disagree. They will cite (and praise) the film’s ambiguity, since after all, isn’t art supposed to enlarge our sense of the space of uncertainty and ambiguity in our lives—forgetting entirely that the work in question is a cartoon and is seen by many (most?) of its audience as such. Artists have always wanted to have it both ways: to titillate, console, and aggrandize the consumers of their work, while delivering suitably ‘progressive’ messages or critiques of social conditions. But Hollywood is more shameless in this than the other arts, and Nolan is doing nothing if not following a time-honored tradition. His Batman saga fits what must have been the film industry’s motto all along: Hollywood—we make vengeance palatable for America.

Entertaining such thoughts has value, not as a way to deliver a brief against Nolan and his movie but because it might lead us in the direction of actually undertaking to untangle the meaning of the violence that haunts our actual national life—from predator drones to prison rapes to the endless toll of mundane and undramatic murders that unfold daily, which action movies do not reflect so much as provide a comforting screen for (pun intended).

But please, don’t get all bent out of shape. I’m only suggesting a thought experiment. A what-could-happen-if scenario. I proposed a couple of outcomes—and perhaps not the most important ones. Remembering this: what matters in my view is the possibility of thinking about what’s happened in more idiosyncratic ways, without consolation, in isolation, adrift in arenas that would be taboo in groups. Who knows what such thinking might reveal about who we are and what we are becoming, if such unexpected lines of thought were pursued in the privacy of an un-ameliorated grief and fear, before we rushed to come together as a community and ‘move on’?

W. and the Mad Barber of Cranbrook: A Fable

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 11:48 pm in Culture, LIfe, Politics | 0 comments

Romney’s bullying.

Given that this blog has assiduously avoided anything topical with the secret goal (more or less realized) of making itself invisible to search engines, what on earth might now possess me to add my words to the torrent on Romney’s great haircutting debacle? Only perhaps that I was shocked. As a headline scanner, I had first thought: well, so Romney teased a boy who was gay about his hair. What a jerk. Then I read the story. I suppose there are those who think attacking someone—leading the group in the attack—and cutting his hair is no more than a mild prank. But really holding someone down and taking scissors to him? “Like a pack of wild dogs,” as one participant remembers it. Did you do things like that in high school? I didn’t think so.

Others have pointed out that this incident was not entirely unique. They noted how Romney seems to have taken particular joy in guiding a teacher with poor eyesight into a glass door (Gail Collins in the Times), and still others conclude that his claim not to remember the haircutting attack is perhaps as bad as the event itself (Charles M. Blow, also in the Times, among others).

But I’d like to come at this story from a slightly different angle. Here’s what I propose: I’d like to recall an incident of bullying I observed as a child growing up in Texas at roughly the same time that Romney was attending prep school in Michigan. I’d then like to suggest that this incident was an example of a culture of bullying then present in Texas that seemed as normal and natural to its perpetrators and victims as it did to its audience—and bullying is primitive theater, let’s not forget that. I’d then further like to take a leap and suggest that the Texas I grew up in helped shape the personality of George W. Bush, the Republican figure Romney most resembles, despite their widely variant styles and personalities, and that Bush and Romney both share a propensity for playing the bully.

•

When Mitt Romney was in high school I was a student in a North Dallas junior high. Every day after lunch several hundred of us were turned loose to roam across a large asphalt playground behind the school gym. There was a boy named Robert Jacobson who played among us (name changed to protect, even after all these years). Robert suffered some unidentified disorder or incapacity—probably undiagnosed, given the times. He walked on his toes and did not connect appropriately with others. He just stood out. His nickname—and it was his only name on the playground—was Twinkletoes. During lunch kids would throw pennies, and Robert would chase them, running in an awkward stiff legged gait, high on his toes, his arms flung out, unbent at the elbows, after the pennies. Day after day. It was only years later that I realized the significance of the pennies: Robert was of course Jewish. And as everyone around me seemed to know, Jews will chase pennies.

So there you have it. A crude anti-Semitism. A vicious mocking game aimed at someone who was defenseless. I’ve pondered over the years how I didn’t understand the meaning of the pennies. I believe some part of me must have known. Yet I knew better than to know. Because another part of me, equally buried, understood only too well the threat of violence and retribution that lay behind the playground game, and recognized my lack of immunity. I was no hero. I witnessed but did nothing.

•

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George W. Bush grew up in this world too, in Midland, Texas, a few hundred miles west of the playground where Robert chased his pennies. And of course that doesn’t make him guilty of anything. But this was the same George Bush who built his career around the notion of his being shaped and formed by his Texas boyhood, his values and perceptions of life arising out of his Midland roots. And so when I say that George Bush was immersed in his boyhood in the same culture I was, I’m just saying what he’s saying. Except that I’m adding that I suspect that what he learned in his Texas youth, in addition to all those heroic qualities we heard about endlessly in his political campaigns, was the fondness for reprisal and dominance that are the core of bullying, its thrill of reaching through the boundaries of another’s selfhood and violating it with impunity, its assertion of ownership—of the Other, but also of the cultural landscape itself, territoriality being one of its key features.

Am I right? Was George Bush manufactured as a bully in his West Texas boyhood? No way to prove it. We know of his subsequent actions: how he laughingly mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the woman whose death sentence he refused to commute. We know about his ready resort to violence—and this readiness lies behind all bullying. Of his childhood, no certainty. But what I do know is the milieu in which he operated. I know that it was a common sport among West Texas boys in those days to run down (as in run over and kill) jackrabbits and wild dogs in their cars and trucks on the back roads and ranch lands. (I knew a man in East Texas who would cruise its black tops at night running over possums who had come out to sleep on warm asphalt—running them over at slow speed and then watching in the red glare of his taillights as they writhed.)

Nor am I claiming that George Bush went on those hunts after rabbits and wild dogs in West Texas, or that he was violent in the way that man in East Texas was. I take him at his word—and not in the smarmy way of members of his political party when they comment on Obama’s religious beliefs—when he speaks of compassionate conservatism. It was no false veneer. Liberals mistook him by assuming hypocrisy where something more complicated was going on.

No, I believe George W. Bush believed in his compassionate conservatism without reservation. But I also suspect his views were an elaborate psychic countermeasure against the brutality he grew up with, whose wrongness he must have sensed. For I feel certain, looking at what Bush became, and his fearful reaction after 9/11, his authorizing of torture and his swaggering across the international stage (his administration peopled with the kind of full-on bullies that the doubtful bully often surrounds himself with—the Cheneys and Boltons who would do the real dirty work), that this man’s moral outlook, as he grew up in a Texas whose politics were being shaped by the nascent John Birch Society, in a Texas where racism and anti-Semitism comprised an almost universal lingua franca, was formed through a series of reactions to the violence and bullying he saw around him—that toxic mix of fear and complicity, of signing up because not signing up meant a fall into oblivion, and demurral because some part of every person withdraws, at least at first.

•

Back to George Romney. So we now know that Romney was definitively an abuser in his childhood. The idea—repeated by that amiable bully Bill O’Reilly, whose whole career has been built on the pleasures viewers receive in seeing the defenseless attacked (c.f. his comments on New Orleans flood victims as they were literally scrambling to survive on rooftops)—is that what happens in childhood should stay in childhood. But of course what happens in childhood doesn’t stay in childhood. It creeps into the land beyond, only perhaps papered over with a civilizing veneer, or sluiced into a socially acceptable direction, unless a kind of conversion experience, built on deep awareness, intervenes. Romney has clearly not experienced such an intervention, about this or any of the other many episodes of bullying and teasing he engaged in. That is the true shame of his silence and denial in his response to the Washington Post story.

Romney is very different from Bush: a real man of business, whereas Bush was always closer to the greeter at the casino, the guy who was content to keep the touts happy and then get teary-eyed and sentimental when the big winners raked it in. Romney by contrast was far closer to the genuine article—in fact not so much a businessman as the financial world’s variant of the old-fashioned industrialist, an occupant of the highest rung of the food chain, who believes himself to be entitled to every bit of it.

Yet both of them are bullies in their own way, and this comes as no surprise. For in this new century, and for a variety of perhaps complicated but also obvious reasons (the electorate’s compensation for feelings of powerlessness, old-fashioned rage at the possibility of displacement and diminishment of privilege) can it really be possible to imagine the Grand Old Party, now transformed into something that would have made those Birchers in the ’60s proud, nominating anyone for president who is not a bully?

Remembering Shock and Awe Nine Years Later

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 10:42 pm in Culture, Politics | 2 comments

The war began on television nine years ago this week, and I’m wondering what we remember about it. I mean not the war and all that came after, but specifically its beginning: the Shock and Awe bombing campaign that started on March 21, and the fighting that continued in the coming days. And by remembering I mean something more than that vague sense we have of a long-ago episode from an old TV program long since canceled. I mean do we really remember what it felt like and what we thought, as the first concussions ripped the night air of Baghdad? Because in fact, those first days of the war were as bizarre as any moments ever recorded on live television, and now, nine years later, it’s as if this deeply strange experience we all lived through has just disappeared. Never to be spoken of.

•

The key was that it was all televised, and televised more specifically as though it were a theatrical event produced for public consumption. We can summon, if we try, the strangeness of the time: how arcs of light poured out of our television sets in living rooms and offices, in waiting areas and barrooms, in airports and kitchens, the explosions seeming almost to rock the rooms we lived in. And it was true: cameras were everywhere, including, astoundingly in Baghdad itself, at the very nexus point of the violence. (If you balk at the idea that television was all important, consider that a war of retribution in Afghanistan had already been fought, a war which, due to local conditions, had failed to offer the satisfying theatrical experience that Iraq produced on its opening night alone.)

This second round thus had its own aesthetic logic and became necessary as a matter of art. Those blooms of fire over Baghdad—retribution, caught in the camera’s lens—were the direct payout for the debt of fire over New York. The visuals were what really mattered. For many—and perhaps this is what is most troubling—the raw wounds of 9/11 were being healed that night.

•

And who can forget what followed in the coming days, as the first week of battle unfolded? How the television lens carried us on a vertiginous carnival ride into the heart of battle. We were all there, caught behind the lens. One moment: tanks roaring across the desert—dust, noise, and the thrilling disorientation of war spilling into our living rooms. A wind-whipped correspondent shouting into a microphone. A troop carrier blasts past. Soldiers dig in the sand. Fast cut to a carrier deck. The war whoop of an F-18 careening into flight and suddenly we’re on board the aircraft, the horizon tilting, the great dusty landmass of Iraq below. (A television correspondent actually asked one of the pilots returning from a sortie, “How was your performance tonight?”)

A second quick cut, and now we’re in a oil field, burning, and even before we’ve had a chance to imagine the acrid smell of the smoke, we fast cut to a small arms gun battle on the outskirts of some village, a scene so rich in imagery and drama, people will say it’s better than Saving Private Ryan. (And people will actually say this.) And then the coup de grâce, the most thrilling images of all, because it’s so like a video game: film from a helicopter gunship, or a Warthog, of an Iraqi soldier or a lone station wagon on the ground, and we watch as the gun sights lock, sudden trails of the weapons smoking through the air, the erasure in the sand of the human being, the vehicle, reduced to ant lion hill smudges, all calmly recorded in the neutral eye of the lens. (And I heard young men, and more than one—and this is pure fact—talking gleefully about these images. Did you see that? they said. They wiped that fucker out! Laughing.)

•

In some instances canadian pharmacy cialis there is no guarantee the treatment will even arrive. At the international market level they offer prescription drugs and generatic medications at the rates lower than of Canadian pharmacy. samples of levitra At movement online cialis pills our website the body generates and exhales in an atmosphere much more carbon dioxide than at rest. Don’t drive or operate any machinery soon after taking this medicine cialis prescription cost as it causes dizziness and drowsiness. All of it then was performance, but really all of it (and here I’m borrowing from Slavoj Žižek, the philosopher and social theorist): not only those on the stage (the Iraqis, Saddam, the troops, George W., Cheney, and Rumsfeld), but us (the audience). We were performing too—as though the theater itself with cast and audience had been set up on a still larger stage. And that’s the key point. Not who we were performing for—read Žižek if you want elaboration on that point. But that we too, the watchers, were participating in a performance that thematically advanced a single idea: that we, like the townspeople in the old Westerns, had witnessed justice being done.

•

In Zarathustra, human beings distorted by the spirit of revenge are called tarantulas. And their motto: “Let it be the very justice of the world to become full of our vengeance.” And so Iraq became full of our vengeance.

•

There is a kind of embarrassment in having been swept away by an aesthetic spectacle that we later acknowledge to have been meretricious. Our teen-age enthusiasms we sometimes look back upon with a benevolent but knowing eye. More problematic are the memories of more humiliating enthusiasms. These we simply suppress, living as though they never happened, even as they remain part of the ocean floor we travel over.

I submit that those early days of the Iraq war fall into this second category of pure suppression. Obviously, under such conditions, there’s no possibility of reckoning or contrition. And why should there be? If we were to acknowledge our wrongs, we would deprive ourselves of the right to witness future performances of similar spectacles. Somewhere in the farther reaches of the psyche we want to hold on to a ticket to a later run of the same play, with only a few scenes changed, and with a new cast. That ticket is our right to violence without regret. It may be bad art, but it’s the art we need to justify our lashing out and our indifference to the meaning of our own conduct.

•

In the days following the opening of the Iraq campaign, I had just moved into an apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was an odd time to be in an unfamiliar neighborhood, with the different sounds, the feel of daily life new and strange—and all punctuated, illuminated by those flashes of light pouring out of the screen into the living room.

It was a damp chilly March, but not so cold that the windows couldn’t be left open, and I remember night after night in the kitchen as I cleaned up, listening to the call of a bird just outside, and night after night, the same bird calling. Its whistle was clear and pure, and I soon realized its two-note call was always the same: a minor third, starting at the tonic. A mournful, lonely sound. I’ve never heard such a call, before or since, but listening to that brief song, repeated again and again in the otherwise silent night, an eerie sense invaded me. This became the music of my spring, the music for me that played contrapuntally against the sounds of that faraway battle pouring out of the TV screen. The blue notes, the music of elegy and regret.

Top 10 Most Important Things That Happened to Me in 2011

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 10:23 pm in LIfe | 0 comments

And the trees mourned the year's passing ...

9. Two words: parking ticket. Two times. Ouch.

8. For the third year in a row my efforts to memorize the Biblical book of Genesis shuddered to a stop at the scene where the giants come down to earth and have sex with the humans. I don’t know why. I just can’t get past it.

7. One night I saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms.

6. A catastrophic moment: wait, I’m drawing a blank here. But trust me, it happened.

5. After taking an over-the-counter allergy med before bedtime last spring, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night with an entire poem etched in my consciousness. I had the feeling that a Sprite or Muse had dipped my brain in fairy dust in which the words had been traced with the index finger of an angel. For a moment I considered getting up and writing down the poem, but it seemed so fresh and clear in my mind, and I was very sleepy. Assuming I would remember it in the morning, I slipped back into a contented sleep knowing that when I awoke the history of poetry was about to undergo a shattering change. Alas, in the cold light of day, the poem had vanished. I remember only one phrase: a damsel with a dulcimer. Hell of line, too.
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4. One day I looked out the window. Something I don’t do that often. Out of fear. About what I might see. About what might be out there. Or in here. That I couldn’t see until I looked out there. Bad cycle.

5a. During an “Internet search,” I realized the “damsel with a dulcimer” line was from a famous poem from the Past.

3. My novel, The Doom Prophecy, was not picked up by a publisher—once again.

2. A potted basil plant in my windowsill began sprouting roses. I think so at least. Or perhaps this was only a dream.

1. And the number one thing that happened to me in 2011: I stole a kiss from the new moon while the old moon lay in her arms.

How I Learned to Love Servicing the Rich

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 7:09 pm in Politics | 0 comments

From their balcony Wall Street grandees drink champagne and mock OWS protesters

By now the evidence that a bifurcated economy has risen out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis—its upper branch expanding and healthy and its lower branch contracting and seriously ill—is overwhelming. The news stories documenting this reality come like pulses of blood from the lower depths: Price increases of only a few cents on basic necessities at Walmart lead buyers to stop purchasing products; a quaint sales technique from the distant past, layaway plans, are back; and consumer confidence has crashed to historic lows. Conversely, like showers of gold and jewels out of the high heavens, comes news of skyrocketing prices on luxury goods, feverish sales in high end Manhattan apartments, and the best market in years in yacht sales.

These facts get repeated often enough, but like peanut shells thrown at the rhinoceros in the zoo, they bounce off harmlessly. The news of—shhhh—endemic inequality is almost a new kind of fact, a ghost fact that ought to be of normal density and opacity yet somehow becomes weightless and transparent.

This invisible density, like dark matter, affects the public discourse, but in a distorted way. A discomfort seizes its denizens who react by longing for a return to a mythic status quo ante that in fact endorses the status quo hic et nunc.

Facing the truth means first facing—I started to say elementary economic reality—but it’s more basic than that. Call it simple math. Here’s the formula. The accrual of wealth at the upper margin—driven in significant measure by a transfer of money from the lower and middle registers—collapses the markets that those in the middle and at the bottom might otherwise compete in. To put this another way: The old route to social mobility was to build a better mousetrap. But the rich have no need of a better mousetrap, and the rest of us can’t afford one.

Is there hope? Well, it turns out there is, and it was hiding in plain sight all along. I discovered the solution to our economic woes indulging one of my favorite pastimes: thumbing through the endless mounds of old yellowing New York Times editions I keep stacked in my living room. I stumbled upon the following headline on this article dated November 27, 2010: “Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its.”
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In the article, Professor Andrew Caplin of New York University speculated about a new economy that he believes is emerging in the U.S. He told the Times: “Unfortunately, there will be income inequality. But enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.” (italics mine)

The phrasing is somewhat convoluted, but the meaning is clear. If all the money is at the top, then the rest of us will survive the Darwinian free-for-all best by learning to enjoy servicing the rich. The Times went on to summarize Caplin’s views: “[The professor] says he expects a rise in what he calls ‘artisanal services,’ like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too—experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.”

So memo to the rehashed flower children of Occupy Wall Street: Put down your pitchforks, and take up a broom—no, I don’t mean the kind you sweep the streets with but the smaller variety used by valets to brush the coats of their masters. Make yourself useful to the Wall Street grandees, the kind who were seen drinking champagne from a balcony during the early days of the misguided OWS protest. There are shoes to be shined and champagne glasses to be replenished. Whole new industries and specialties will spring up: Nose hair trimmers to the rich and famous. Ear wax removers. Foot massage specialists whose hands have been specially softened by nightly dips in hog lard. Highly skilled experts will make very satisfactory livings managing the rectal well-being of the elite. Additional favors will no doubt pay favorable rates. As for artist, some adjustments will be necessary. For musicians, soothing ditties with modest dance beats; for painters, a new vogue in heroic portraiture; for satirists, scathing portrayals of the lazy poor.

It’s quite simple really. Everyone agrees the country needs a course correction. Professor Caplin has given us the bearing. So quit your griping; there’s money to be made out there, y’all. Forward, then, to our glorious future.

Genesis of a P.J. Harvey Fanboi

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 7:29 pm in Music | 0 comments

It’s a bit strange to find yourself mugged by a record album. At a certain age, that is. Young, it’s normal. But that obsessive, slightly sweaty, adolescent quality that goes along with getting a song stuck in the cerebral cortex in a way that feels like infatuation—that’s unexpected. And yet here I am under the sway of one Polly Jean Harvey and the record she released earlier this year: Let England Shake. My embarrassment doesn’t end there: I’ve been vaguely aware of P.J. for a couple of decades without ever really listening, so not only am I a sudden fan, I’m a late fan. It could hardly get worse. (Though in my own defense, Let England Shake hasn’t made that big a splash in the US market—nothing like Adele. I can’t imagine why.)

Faced with the incomprehensible—on so many levels—I turned to old behavior. Yes, just as I did ‘back in the day’ when I fell in love with a record, I went to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the place where teens can let the nation know what they’re thinking about ‘pop’ music. It was good to be back in old Studio B. Dick must have remembered me from way back when, because I was hustled right up on the bandstand, where, preliminaries over, Dick took me through the paces of the old ritual:

Dick: What makes this record special?
Me: Lyrics and beats, Dick!
Dick: Can you dance to it?
Me: Absolutely!
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Me: Best record since Sgt. Pepper. Or maybe Trout Mask Replica. Anyway, also Early Velvet and Lou Reed of Dirty Blvd.
Dick: [slight puzzlement noted] Ah, great. Best lyric?
Me: So many, Dick. How about: ‘Goddamn Europeans/Take me back to beautiful England/And the gray damp filthiness/Of ages and battered books/And fog rolling down behind mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea captains.’
Dick: [puzzlement increasing] Yeah. Okay. Overall thoughts?
Me: An examination limning the role of violence in producing culture, nationhood, the self in the tradition of Macbeth—a work almost entirely unique in the history of pop culture rich in reference that ranges from Gallipoli and the Great War to Iraq, from Pound to Eddie Cochran.
Dick: [frozen smile, suddenly brightening into something genuine] Time for a commercial break!

An Act of Kindness and the Death of a Rat

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 7:26 pm in LIfe | 0 comments

The station at 7th Avenue, Brooklyn

I was at the 7th Avenue stop of the Q train in Brooklyn, on my way to Manhattan. The weather was good that day, the station mild and pleasant and almost entirely deserted, probably because a train had passed through recently.

My Q train strategy: walk to the front of the platform (more chance for a seat there). So I’m heading in that direction about thirty feet from the end, and then I see something moving on the concrete before me, something small and definitely ugly and yet clearly alive, about the size of a grown man’s hand. I stop dead. What gives the moment its strangeness is that at first I can’t tell what it is. (I think: a bird, a squirrel, a rat—in the subway, naturally you think: rat.) A living thing is here where it shouldn’t be, not down in the tracks, but here where we wait for the train, and what I feel then is the very specific fear of contamination.

My first reaction is to back away, but I’m also curious, and so I step forward cautiously. And then I know: it’s a rat, after all—but so thin and desiccated as to be hardly recognizable, its coat sparse, patches of livid pink showing through, bleak eyes staring, dark and empty.

It’s trying to walk but keeps listing badly to one side.

I suppose it’s an odd thing to say, but until this moment, I’ve never considered what it must be like for a rat to face death—not abstractly, that is, but actually. And yet here it is, the dying animal’s eyes somehow alert (and yet still lusterless and empty) with something like puzzlement. And I understand that what I’m witnessing is the animal response to the intransigence and failure of the body.

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But now someone else has come closer. I turn my head (again, that quick, hooded look)—and see a woman perhaps in her late thirties. She has that somewhat pinched or strained appearance of people who have been in the city a long time, perhaps living alone and working some unglamorous job steadily and punctually. (It’s just a feeling I have—for all I know she may be a glamorous but dressed down magazine editor.) Then a moment unfolds between us, the urban ritual, in which two people consider whether to say something to one another and then decide not to.

We stand like that, watching the rat trying to drag itself off somewhere but unable to do so, while the rat watches us, or seems to, but without any real interest, its attention focused entirely on trying to make its awkward body function right.

At some point I become aware that the woman standing near me has opened her bag and is poking around inside it, and then I realize that she’s removed a small container. It’s transparent plastic, and so I see at once that it’s filled with dry cat food. Perhaps our eyes skip past one another’s again. But then she steps forward, closer to the rat—far closer than I would have dared to—and taps a few pellets of the cat food onto the concrete in front of the animal. She steps back to her former position. Our eyes may have met again, but again neither of us says anything. I have the feeling that almost everyone on the platform has noticed what she’s done. Then the grinding sound of a train enters the station, pushing a wind down the length of the tube. The rat begins to nibble on the dried pellets, but listlessly, as though it’s a purely mechanical reaction.

Then the train comes to a stop, the doors slide open, and everyone steps inside—the woman with the cat food has disappeared into another car. The doors slide shut, we’re sealed inside, and we begin to move, and then I catch one last glimpse of the rat with its little storehouse of food as the train enters the tunnel.

Eyes Wide Open: Thoughts on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 10:10 pm in Literature | 0 comments

Cover art for The Pale King

Clear statement of purpose: this is not exactly a review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel. So what is then? A few words, thoughts, reactions, sentiments, ruminations that taken together, I think, may give a taste of what the novel has to offer.

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Strange way to start a review to point out that a quote mark might be missing at ‘To tell the truth…’ on page 500. A ridiculous observation, no? And yet I couldn’t help thinking when I noticed it that even this inconsequential moment hints at the sadness that lives at the edge of every sentence of The Pale King. David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008 has closed off the possibility that his novel will ever be finished, or that the minor typographical error on page 500 will ever be corrected by him. And knowing his legendary fussiness about all things grammatical, you know he would have.

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The all-encompassing sadness mentioned above attaches to the novel’s beautiful sentences, of which there are more than can be counted, because each one harbors the loss of all that might have come after. That possibility gone for him of writing the sentence beyond the current one that is the hope of all writers; that tomorrow the combination of words that finds its way to the page will just destroy everything that went before it.

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Sadness, sure, sure, sure. But the book is so funny, so often. The humor is at times slapstick and obvious, which is great and a DFW signature, but in other cases, it’s more subtle, jokes within jokes, or jokes about jokes. I’ll give one example that may contain a mix of these formats (though this is always risky because you won’t necessarily see the humor, especially out of context). This happens on page 241, when an important character, who has already been shown to be more than a little eccentric and maybe compulsively attentive, is going to an appointment after an epic Chicago snowstorm:

Now what I love about this is how the character rushes to the umbrella in the snowdrift and not only begins digging but actually shouts to see if its owner is buried in the snow. I love the deadpan. But I quoted more than was needed because I also love the lead-in: how his eyes are closed, the sounds he hears, the nice double hyphens: lit-up blood-red—there’s probably a term in rhetoric for that—the fathers’ old hats on the snowmen, and only then the umbrella, the crisis—that begins with the blood-red in there.

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Adam Kirsch of The New Republic didn’t much care for the chapters in which a character named David Wallace shows up and becomes a part of the story. (I’ll link but it’s behind a paywall.) This David Wallace has just been suspended from his prestigious Eastern college for having written essays for pay for rich lazy students, returning in disgrace to his home in the Midwest to take a temporary job at an IRS processing center. DFW of course was never suspended from Amherst, where he wrote theses in both English and philosophy, both of which were published, and is remembered as one of the most extraordinary students in the school’s history. But I thought these fake memoir scenes were really funny. First of all, there’s the “Author’s Foreword,” inserted at Chapter 9, in which David Wallace advances an almost Kafkaesque set of elaborately flawed arguments to prove that the memoir really is a memoir and not fiction, including an account of Byzantine discussions that supposedly took place with the legal department of his publisher. The point of it all is to prove that the standard disclaimer on the book’s copyright page (‘The characters and events in this book are fictitious,’ etc.) was canceled out by the author’s foreword in Chapter 9, a logical impossibility—the disclaimer comes first, and so any effort to disclaim the disclaimer later must then be ‘fictitious’—but the absurdity only makes the ridiculous elaboration of the argument all the more enjoyable. Funnier still, for me, is the description of David Wallace’s bus trip to the town where the IRS processing center is located. Anyone who has ever taken a cross-country bus ride will recognize the lunacy barely held at bay within the bus compartment—perfectly and comically evoked.

•

Much of the novel takes place in the 1970s, a time in which I was present, though perhaps not fully accounted for. (I’m an older guy. Nice way of saying.) Anyway, I found myself thinking there might be a number of anachronisms in the novel regarding this period. For instance, on page 190 mention is made of everyone wearing Timberlands. Another sentence (I’ve lost where) speaks of Docksiders and Timberlands. Okay. Maybe so. I can only report that I don’t remember Timberlands being such a major force in that epoch. Docksiders yes. And something called Earth Shoes. Indeed I was the owner of (one) pair of Earth Shoes, which had a specially lowered heel supposedly conducive to happiness and peace. I am aware that having owned (even one pair of) Earth Shoes will expose me to ridicule among the young—if word ever gets out. So look, maybe everybody was wearing Timberlands, alright? Maybe I just missed the boat. It’s true—I missed many boats. But until I see some hard evidence to the contrary, I’m just not buying it.

Another example (though not necessarily of an anachronism, per se, so much as an interesting assertion about colloquial usage): on page 426, in a chapter in which two characters discuss the ’60s and its cultural referents, one character uses the word ‘groovy,’ and the other responds, “That’s just it. Nobody really said groovy. People who said groovy, or called you man were just playing out some fantasy they’d seen on CBS reports.” I don’t believe this to be quite accurate. Though it’s true groovy was not frequently used in the ’60s and early ’70s, certainly not so much as ‘far out,’ which for a time threatened the language development of an entire generation (and yet how odd it’s died out so utterly and completely), people did say groovy from time to time, and perhaps because there was a certain danger in using it, a certain approach to something inauthentic or even kitschy, its use was reserved for occasions of, one might even say, moment, or at least the word developed a special power as a result.

I’ll report a single use of it in this sense. At the end of my freshman year of college I was in love with a girl (and you can imagine what this means for a 19-year-old, a combination of sexual brio and confused overlapping incoherent longings acting together as a kind of meteor set loose in the naïve body over which no control, propulsive, almost insensate, a nearer approach to unconsciousness, etc.) who had been the girlfriend of my roommate for much of my freshman year. They had recently broken up, but I had been in love with her (see qualification above) for months. On a particular night we somehow ended up together, hanging out (more…)

A Sidewalk Story, Or How A Fight Over A Patch of Ground Changed The Neighborhood

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 11:23 am in LIfe, Politics | 0 comments

The contested sidewalk today ...

My neighborhood has been undergoing some changes lately, which puts me in mind of an incident that occurred a few years ago that was certainly a harbinger of that change, if not the moment of its ushering in.

I should tell you first about a fellow who lived three doors down, whose house I walked past each morning on my way to work. He was a retired gardener—a fact I didn’t learn from him; he never spoke to me or even acknowledged my existence. He exuded an aura of curmudgeonliness, hard-won and carefully cultivated. I learned about his past from another more talkative neighbor. Anyway it made sense. The retired gardener kept a meticulously neat garden in his little patch of front yard: a quince tree (we only lost it when the tornado came through Brooklyn last fall), a lawn he kept trimmed with a hand-push mower, and several bushes lining the low fence, which he cut in topiary shapes. It was the topiary touch that really gave him away as a gardener. Curmudgeon he may have been, but it’s hard to hold a grievance against someone who keeps a garden the way he did.

At a certain point a new neighbor moved into my building. He was a big fellow with a square head, and like our neighbor down the street not what you’d call a friendly person. When he was having trouble getting cable installed, he greeted a suggestion I made with one of those stony stares that makes you quite certain that even if his feet were on fire you wouldn’t loan him a glass of water. I filed him away in that cabinet marked ‘inconsequential’ and went about my business, though I might’ve noticed a few weeks later that he had gotten himself a dog, a German Shepherd, if I remember rightly, with mournful woebegone eyes.

Meanwhile the neighbor down the street was beginning to behave in a slightly more eccentric fashion. For a couple of weeks as I passed his house on the way to work, I’d see him sprinkling water out of a can onto the sidewalk in front of his property. I remember thinking this was a bit much. Though he from time to time rinsed the walk with a garden hose, this latest move looked like preparation to give his sidewalk a daily scrub—well, the fellow’s proclivity for neatness was becoming a mania. This went on, as I said, for two weeks, until one morning as I walked by his place, he spoke to me for the first time. “Do you know the fellow in your building with the dog?” Now I’ve lived in New York long enough to avoid even the most benign guilt-by-association gambit. Plus I didn’t much care for my co-tenant. So I quickly denied any but a passing knowledge of him—pretty much the truth anyway. I think that’s all that was said; at least it’s all I remember. I walked away more puzzled than ever.

It wasn’t until a few days later that the mystery was cleared up. I was talking to my gregarious neighbor, an interesting guy in his own right: he worked on cars parked in the street and did odd jobs around the neighborhood. But he also rented a tiny storefront around the corner where he had set up an impromptu art gallery for his paintings. Though I more than once stopped to look at these efforts in the dusty display window, I can’t now summon them up, try as I might. I do remember them having great sincerity. But the gallery had few visitors. I remember going outside one summer night and finding him standing on the sidewalk, his eyes shining. A mockingbird was delivering an endless series of whoops and whistles from a light pole just down the street. “A nightingale,” he said “I could just sit here and listen all night.” It was he who enlightened me about my neighbor’s mysterious question. My co-tenant had been walking his dog to the sidewalk in front of the retired gardener’s house where the dog would urinate, much to the retired gardener’s outrage. To put an end to what he saw as this gross violation, he began sprinkling a mixture of pepper and water on the sidewalk in front of his place.

This might have been the end of the story—the dog of the mournful countenance might simply have found a new place to water his surroundings, except that somehow my apartment building mate realized what the old fellow was doing. He threatened to call the police—or perhaps he did. It wasn’t entirely clear. But this I do know: the retired gardener was worried. His question to me—and breaking his vow of silence must have cost him—was meant to gather intelligence and perhaps ward off the danger he saw marching toward him. The exact details of the final act in the drama are veiled to me. I could only see the results: end of pepper water; more or less disappearance of both parties from view. The little stage there at the end of the block, a patch of uneven Brooklyn sidewalk, had been entirely abandoned, or so it seemed, by the principals in the drama.
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One way of looking at this neighborhood vignette is as a minor comedy about foolishly feuding neighbors. Part of me saw it in exactly that way. But I also know there’s a falseness to that enchantment. The retired gardener was an African-American man who had lived on the block for years when the block’s residents were almost all African-Americans. The man with the German Shepherd was white, a recent arrival at what might have been the inflection point for the neighborhood’s “gentrification.” (When my wife and I—both white—moved in several years before this episode, we could tell ourselves we were just living in a diverse neighborhood, our preference, and perhaps even feel good about that; it was easy to pretend we were not part of the gentrifying process. Though of course we were simply an earlier phase of it.)

The trouble with stories is that you never know for sure what they mean, or what they hide. Perhaps the War of the Sidewalk really was just a story about characters in the neighborhood and no more. But I have my suspicions that what happened on the block is another story altogether. For if I think about it, my (white) co-tenant never did seem comfortable in his new surroundings, so much so that at the time I remember vaguely thinking that he had gotten the dog to reduce this discomfort—that he had bought the dog of the woebegone eyes as protection. He then got into a conflict with an irascible (black) neighbor and then (at least) threatened to call the police.

Perhaps he had no awareness how threatening this move would be to our neighbor. Our neighbor, rightly or wrongly—and this argument is one that still ripples with uncomfortable regularity across our society from sea to shining sea—sensed where the weight of the law would finally settle. Perhaps he even sensed that he was at least partly objectively in the wrong, but his deeper fear, and I’m quite sure it was fear he was feeling, lay in his belief that the police called in by the white man down the street would finally be an instrument of white power. And so there he was: an old man feeling powerless and stewing in his juices. Meanwhile, it’s worth pointing out that it was likely no picnic for my dog-owning neighbor either. If his fears were of the kind I think they were—admittedly I’m speculating—then he no doubt had to live with his own (certainly biased) fears of retaliation. I suspect his moving away from the neighborhood soon after had everything to do with this.

As for the old man, perhaps it was only a coincidence, but a few weeks later he suffered a health setback, perhaps a stroke. He managed to hang onto the house for a time, but soon moved out. The talkative neighbor said he went to assisted-living in the Bronx. The house was soon sold, remodeled from top to bottom, and a young family of professionals moved in. The topiary bushes were removed. The quince tree, as I mentioned, was uprooted in the tornado a year later.

Many changes have followed. The non-registered halal butcher shop around the corner on Washington Avenue where some guys were selling goat meat out of iced-down coolers has been replaced by a high-end cake shop. On the corner of Washington, the rather curious and obviously quixotic enterprise run by a guy who was trying to create some kind of local alternative to Mailboxes, Etc. has been replaced by an antique boutique. Gone too is my nightingale listening friend—his art gallery first shuttered, then converted into a yoga studio, now vacant. The neighborhood has not lost all of its diversity—this is Brooklyn after all. But it’s lost something amid the proliferation of Thai and Sushi restaurants, what used to be called Internet cafés, and actually trendy bars. There are now some days in the neighborhood when the number of hipsters per square foot is approaching the density at which nuclear combustion occurs.

Guatemala’s Dirty War: Part 1

Posted by Peter Vilbig on 10:35 pm in Politics | 0 comments

The grimly dark account of political murder and betrayal involving Guatemala’s ruling classes in the April 4 issue of the New Yorker (which you can read here) started me thinking about my own time in Guatemala as a freelance reporter on assignment for the Dallas Morning News in the fall of 1982. (I was in many ways the classic freelance journalist: callow, inexperienced, but curious and full of zeal—and also like the classic freelancer, full of parasites. I arrived in Guatemala city flying in from Honduras with a case of amoebic dysentery picked up in the Honduran Mosquitia region.) There’s much I could say about my circumstances, about how I wound up in Guatemala, about my reporting trip itself, which was not going well. But rather than creating a memoir of that time, I would like to use this space to recall with as little embellishment as possible, and as well as I can after so many years, a particular afternoon during my month-long stay in the country that would seem to bear on the New Yorker’s depiction of current conditions there, and especially on the country’s long and tragic civil war—the so-called dirty war—that consumed the final decades of the last century.

I had arrived in Guatemala at an unusual moment in the country’s ongoing civil disturbances. A military officer named Rios Montt had seized power in a coup seven months before and had announced a series of reforms. And in fact, by most accounts violence in Guatemala City, the capital, had fallen. The year before there had been frequent bombings and political murders in the city each month. But critics argued that the government was continuing to wage a brutal war in the countryside against leftist guerrillas and by extension against the native Indian peoples of those regions. This war had long been criticized as the pretext for a brutal land grab against these native communities. Rios Montt denied this, and his critics were of two minds about the denial: one group believed he was simply lying; he was a figurehead who found a way to smooth over the rough edges of the previous regime while continuing its vicious practices. The other group believed Rios Montt to be a kind of naïf in Guatemalan politics, a true believer who thought his reforms were taking hold even as they were being undermined by the Army, which despite his provenance in its ranks, ignored his orders and carried on the dirty war without his knowledge.

Rios Montt’s situation was complicated by religion. In an almost entirely Catholic country, he was an evangelical Christian and a member of an American evangelical church based in California. This church had an impressive compound in Guatemala City, and it was the belief of at least some Guatemalans as well as US observers that the church officers had undue influence on Rios Montt and were even perhaps functioning as a shadow government.

As you can see, there are already two possible shadow governments: the army operating out of Rios Montt’s control, and the American church operating as the force behind his throne. This idea of governing forces operating in shadowy impossible-to-pin-down ways is a primary feature of contemporary Guatemalan politics, as depicted in the New Yorker article. It’s well worth pointing out—and basic fairness dictates this point being made—that Guatemala has made significant progress since the time of the military dictatorship of Montt, and in the eyes of many observers is closer to being a functioning democracy than at any time in recent memory. Yet it’s also true that in both Guatemalas—the contemporary one and the one of Rios Montt’s time—every theory of motive is made murky, as the actual disposition of power lies veiled and hidden.

I made arrangements at a certain point to visit the countryside outside Guatemala City with the idea, no doubt naïve, of trying to find out what was really going on. I traveled, if memory serves, with a British journalist I had met and perhaps another reporter whose background I don’t remember, to San Martín Jilotepeque, a town about 30 miles northwest of Guatemala City, on a bright early fall day. The town had been devastated by the 1976 earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people in Guatemala. Going beyond the main town required permission from the Army—which had involved a good deal of hoop jumping to secure—and an army escort, because the region we were heading into was considered an area of open conflict with the leftist guerrillas who had been fighting the government since the 1960s. The government at this time had set up a series of zones that were supposed to be modeled on the rural pacification program employed in Vietnam, in which the army protected villagers from the leftist by relocating them into model communities. We rendezvoused with an army patrol that would be driving into the rural pacification zone. A young lieutenant was in charge of this patrol, and I concluded, I think rightly, that he was one of the officers who had been placed in a new command as part of Rios Montt’s effort to reform the army. We made the trip standing in the rear of the open army truck with a squad of Guatemalan soldiers.

We arrived in a tiny village after a drive through increasingly dense mountain terrain—I remember this drive as somewhat tense, though perhaps it was only tense for me; certainly the soldiers seemed bored enough. The village was tucked deeply in the folds of the brilliant undulating green mountains of Guatemala’s Central Highlands. In one sense we were driving into the kind of mystical mountain village that American tourists dream of visiting: women in brilliantly colored woven skirts were washing clothing in a stream; wisps of clouds touched the nearby (more…)