The Master's Call

Today, I got nothing.  Enjoy this cowboy conversion narrative.

Will you have a cocktail? There are two here.

But I have to tell you that over the course of-- several years, as I talk to friends and family and neighbors. When I think about-- members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together. When I think about-- those soldiers or airmen or marines or-- sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf-- and yet, feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is gone, because-- they're not able to-- commit themselves in a marriage.

LULZ HOW DO U NO?

Gay Rites

I believe that gay people should be allowed to get married in the sense that I believe accused terrorists deserve a trial by jury with full legal representation in the sense that I believe black men should be able to drive automobiles within the legal limits without being pulled over all the time.  That is to say that I advocate a situational equality within the context of the society we are given even though such equality is in the broader sense fundamentally absurd.  That a state can ban a relationship between individuals, or that a President's view on the matter is of national significance, is really awful to contemplate.  I know marriage is supposed to be some, like, basic physical property of the human universe, paired protons and neutrons or quark spin or some shit or whatever, but really, uh, like, what if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania banned slightly awkward social acquaintances in which you do have each other's cell numbers but you don't really feel comfortable calling even though you need to borrow his pick-up and you're pretty sure he'd be cool with it but maybe you'll just text him instead.  Then the 3rd Circuit overturns the law on twenty-first amendment grounds.  The President of the United States says that although he would probably have sent a private Facebook message, his views on the issue are evolving.  Then Joe Biden, literally, explodes.

The Necessary Preconditions of the Probability of a Thing Happening

U.S. officials declined to provide key details about the plot, citing concern about protecting sensitive intelligence sources and operations. Officials would not say whether a suspect had been caught or specify where the device was seized.

-The Washington Post

If the probability of A
is greater than or equal to the chance
that one more Saudi's bombed some underpants
intending to explode within a day
or several days, or weeks, or anyway
sometime; look, I mean, uh: he plants
the bomb--kaboom!--in order to advance
a deadly plot.  He only needs a way
to build a working bomb.  And all the parts.
Instructions.  Money.  Time.  Know-how and luck.
Encouragement.  Persistence.  Simple pluck.
A can-do spirit.  Patience, will, and smarts.
An airport taxi or a borrowed truck.
A roll of duct tape.  Some poor malleable schmuck
to buy the ticket, board the plain, get fucked.

Ariadne auf Batcave

In an otherwise snippy review in which Anthony Lane mostly laughs at NERDS, he says something very true:

And it always is the world. One of the failings of Marvel—as of other franchises, like the “Superman” series—is the vulgarity that comes of thinking big. As a rule, be wary of any guy who dwells upon the fate of mankind, unless he can prove that he was born in Bethlehem. Superheroes who claim to be on the side of the entire planet are no more to be trusted than the baddies who seek to trash it, nor is the aesthetic timbre of the movies in which they both appear.

So I should say, as one who thinks the artistic merits of cinema as a medium are immensely overblown, I like schlock action and operatic scifi.  They are, to my mind, what the screen ought to be: entertainment inflated until it defies exegesis through sheer indifference to any meaning beyond the superficial.  On the other hand, in an age that measures everything in the hundreds of millions of dollars, these movies tend to bloat, and a swashbuckling good time seems inevitably to grind itself to a metallic halt in the third act when the fate of the world, nay, worlds hangs in the balance.  Must all villains desire world domination?  Couldn't we have an action flick where the bad guy wants, I don't know, beachfront property on Antigua?  Didn't Batman used to fight crime instead of enacting a righteous Job-like confrontation with the vast, inhuman and implacably incomprehensible otherness of the divine?  Like all discounts, saving the world threatens to stick at the lower price; in the endless downward march to rock bottom, every man of modest ambition threatens some kind of Ragnarok; every squid farmer gets a kraken; every misplaced dropkick threatens to tear the very fabric of space and time asunder.  At a certain point the layering of ridiculousness collapses the whole pastry--the ingredients haven't changed, and yet it's nothing you'd ever want to eat.

Sarko revoir

Dieu merci!  18 million French people liked one guy which is more than the not-quite 17 million French people who liked another guy which is still 6 million less than the 30 million odd French people who because of age or circumstance or not giving a shit or doing the only sensible thing and writing in a goat did not vote for either.  Democracy is the most self-congratulatory system of all the systems humanity has ever dreamed up; it relentlessly bellyaches about the utter iniquity of all other modes of organizing a society or a country or a culture or a swap meet or a pyramid scheme and touts its own universal legitimacy even as its own method of determining the fate of men and nations involves giving a meager majority of an actual minority of an overall population the car keys and the bank accounts until the next time the circus is in town.  I mean, Francois Hollande's margin of victory is the equivalent of less than two percent of the population of France, but this somehow represents a change in the national will, whereas, say, being a talented little corporal or descending through no fault or design of one's own from the proper inbred European clan or rising through the ranks to become the Supreme Cleric or whatever is somehow antiquarian and ridiculous.

I've got to admit that I'm going to miss Sarko.  He was exactly the President that the Fifth Republic deserved; like George W. Bush in America, he laid bare the pretensions of the French state by persistently and infelicitously admitting to all the true things it did not wish to admit about itself.