Perish the Reason

Remembering Eden: The Re-Canonization of Humanity’s Sinful Origins in Late-Antiquity

2011-06-01T01:23:00.004-04:00

This paper will demonstrate through the analysis of Jewish and Christian primary sources related to Genesis 1-4 the process by which canonical texts are created and recreated for the purpose of supporting specific identity narratives. Chosen texts will range from the 1st Century CE to the 6th Century CE.

Modern scholars have a talent for parsing timelines, chopping up the past into easily digestible portions bound by some quality deemed important to whatever discursive activity is taking place. Perhaps the most significant division in regards to the study of the whole of the human past is a partitioning of everything before the present into two radically different periods: history and pre-history. The production of texts fundamentally alters the ability to study human thought and culture. Texts, more so than other forms of material culture, present a limiting framework for interpretation and can effectively communicate complex ideas. While the observation of non-textual material culture certainly has a vital place in the study of the human past, the ability to parse a native meaning through written sources is an absolutely invaluable insight into the workings of ancient civilizations. Traditionally speaking, the popular method of interpreting Biblical texts is to pretend that no interpretation is occurring. The majority of scholarship emerging from the Judeo-Christian tradition in Late-Antiquity assumed a fixed authorial intent while also producing widely divergent exegetical conclusions. This would seem to indicate one of two realities: either there is only one viable interpretation amongst many false readings or the far more likely possibility that the meaning of the text is subject to reader manipulation. The canonical texts of the varied Judeo-Christian traditions are treated as cohesive narratives stretching from the dawn of Creation to modernity ignoring “heretical” deviations and dead-ends. The span of time over which Biblical texts were produced defies the finite borders, both in time and space, of any empire or people involved in their production. It is only through the mythology of orthodoxy generated in this two-fold writing tradition of first producing commentary on the body of canon and then canonizing that derivative literature that cultural relevance is maintained. In this way, authors in the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition are able to simultaneously evidence the validity of all that came before while also validating the social and cultural mores of the community spawning the commentary. The continuous act of reconciliation of a textual tradition to a social reality is both the means by which a canon is preserved and the means by which it is employed. This understanding can help to decode the cultural anxieties of the various communities that emerged from or assimilated into the Judeo-Christian identity narrative. Because of the peculiar nature of religious scholarship, one which relies on the firmly held belief that the text’s value lies in the authorial intent of an ultimate creator, it is possible to read the commentary as a standalone work reflecting a meaning devised almost exclusively by the reader. The belief in the infallibility of the word of God enforces an editorial standard that rejects the recognition of self in religious commentary. The illusion of an unbroken chain of scholarly custody from the creator to the commentator contributes to a pattern Barbara Herrnstein-Smith (2000) describes as the ability of a text to “evolve and survive” (p.148), a notion which points to the transitive nature of textual meaning resulting in inclusion within the literary canon.
Perhaps the most important period of the modern Judeo-Christian tradition, in terms of historicity and ideological formation, is Late Antiquity. The Late Antique world saw the rise of the Christian Church within the Roman Empire, the establishment of Rabbinical Judaism following the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the formation of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula and its subsequent conquest of much of the ancient world. The texts arising during this period can help to illustrate the existential anxieties present at points of fracture and contention within the larger population by illustrating the many faces of perceived orthodoxy. To this end, the first four chapters of Genesis prove to be an excellent starting point for inquiry, providing a symbolically rich and suitably vague account of the origins of humanity and the human condition. The mythological ties of creation bind all subsequent liturgical identities to a shared concept of past and provide the most basic point of inquiry for cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison.

To properly discuss the exegesis surrounding Genesis, one must first situate the “original” text. Within the tradition, the Pentateuch is credited to the hand of Moses; however, modern scholarship analyzing the language, terminology, conventions and historicity of the Biblical texts indicates a more eclectic origin (Friedman, 2005, p.7). Without a doubt, the Pentateuch was fully formed prior to the Babylonian Exile and is suspected to have achieved its full form, in terms of content, at the hands of the Aaronid priesthood under King Hezekiah in the 8th Century BCE (Friedman, 2005, p.26). Even within the first four chapters of Genesis, no less than three hands can be attested to in its construction and arrangement which is believed to be comprised of two separate narratives brought together by a redactor (Friedman, 2005, p.35). Inconsistencies in the narrative are plainly evident to the casual reader who should quite readily and without any specialized background be able to pick out contradictions regarding the order of creation as detailed in both (Gen. 1) and (Gen. 2). Another notable element is the shifting nature of God in the text of Genesis, alternating between an omniscient and all-powerful cosmic creator being and a limited supernatural entity that is physically imminent within the garden. The latter characterization of God as a physical presence is believed to be the older of the two incorporated narratives, which would place the later conceptualization of God more in line with the understanding known to have survived into the extant branches of the faith (Friedman, 2005, p.35). Though Friedman (2005) highlights the surviving view of God as being both concerned with the infinite and the finite (p.35), the theological development of that view might be more complex than he lets on, as it could be perhaps be more easily derived from later explanations of inconsistency within the text owing to its piecemeal nature than as a reflection of a original belief in a dual-natured God. By Late Antiquity, the omnipotent God was becoming the dominant paradigm across the religious and philosophical spectrum, if one ignores the physical nature of messianic figures like Jesus Christ who came to be equated with the divine through no small effort of philosophical contortion.

At the obvious risk of defining Late Antiquity far too broadly, it is helpful to discuss 1st Century CE and 2nd Century CE writers in the same breath as their later counterparts as the rise of Judeo-Christian faiths inside the Roman world followed a different trajectory than the empire itself. While the term Late Antiquity is inextricably tied to the political state, it is plain to see that monotheism was in a state of ascendancy, primarily through the proselytizing of Christians in the Gentile community. It is therefore appropriate to begin the discussion of Late Antique monotheism at its roots in the 1st Century CE, the period during which Jesus Christ lived and died and Herod’s Temple fell. These two traumatic events, probably the latter to a greater extent, paved the way for a period of spiritual, personal and political identity reformation that shaped not only the coming centuries but also the modern world. While the majority of the texts addressed in this paper reflect Christian sources, during this formative period there is very little meaningful distinction between Jews and Christians and so it is appropriate to relocate later Christian sources in the context of their Jewish origins. Additionally, these early Jewish sources help to establish some of the mechanical aspects of the canonization process.

The 1st Century CE produced the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenized Jew who attempted to marry Greek philosophical principles and Jewish theology. His work Questions and Answers on Genesis demonstrates a radical willingness to alter the Jewish religious discourse to better reflect what he would view as a wholly rational and modern understanding of the world. Philo perceived no disconnect between his commentary and the text of Genesis, offering it as an explanation of authorial intent rather than a revisionist undertaking. In his arguments he aims to perform the essential two-fold structuralist task of re-canonization: making the past applicable to the present and legitimizing the present by aligning it with a past tradition. Philo’s work reveals the anxieties of upper –class, Hellenized Jews prospering under Roman rule. His attempt to reconcile Jewish theology with Greek philosophy is a multi-faceted argument for the Hellenization of the Jewish people. He simultaneously defends his Hellenization to other Jews while making the case for Judaism as a philosophical tradition compatible with the intellectual standards of the Roman elite. The following passage from Questions and Answers on Genesis demonstrates Philo’s commitment to finding points of intersection between the two intellectual worlds he inhabited.

(17) Why God says, "It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a help meet for him?" (Gen. 2:18). By these words God intimates that there is to be a communion, not with all men, but with those who are willing to be assisted and in their turn to assist others, even though they may scarcely have any power to do so; since love consists not more in utility than in the harmonious concord of trustworthy and steadfast manners; so that everyone who joins in a communion of love may be entitled to utter the expression of Pythagoras, "A friend is another I. (Philo)

Philo’s commentary tends to expand even minor, even seemingly inconsequential points of the narrative into grand lessons of wisdom. This particular passage was not selected so much for the depth of its philosophical underpinnings, but rather for the bold and direct comparison of the words attributed to Moses and Pythagoras respectively. Here, a direct comparison takes place which has of the effect of validating the wisdom of both texts, regardless of whether the reader is a member of the Jewish community. Philo expands on the wording of the text, extrapolating from the foreshadowed relationship of Adam and Eve a grander sense of communal belonging. His need to expand the scope of God’s intimations to include “all men who are willing to be assisted and in their turn to assist” in the relationship being defined for Adam and Eve allows him to set up a clever intersection between his allegorical reading of Genesis and the words of Pythagoras: that Adam’s companion Eve was a part of him (his rib), just as “a friend is another I”.
Even if Philo’s primary goal was not the marriage of Hellenism and Judaism, even if he just sought to address the angst of Jews who had embraced Hellenism at the expense of their standing within the traditional community, then the measure of his success is difficult to determine. His positioning of Moses as a Greek style philosopher possessing a genius intuition for truth predating the famous Greek thinkers did not resonate within the larger Jewish community and met with resistance (Peters, 2004, p.19). Philo’s attempts at convincing the Jewish population to embrace Hellenism were certainly not successful enough in the short term to prevent the Great Revolt of 66CE resulting in the end of the Second Temple Period and fundamentally altered the Jewish worldview. Nor did his writing resonate in the later 117CE uprising amongst Diaspora communities or the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132CE which quashed aspirations of Jewish statehood in the ancient world.
One might argue, that the destruction of Herod’s Temple not only drove a permanent wedge between the Jews and the Hellenistic Roman world, but also between the Jews and the Christians who were able to supplant the spiritual function of the Temple with their own emerging belief system. Philo’s hybridized discourse appealed to Christian scholars on account of the mixed nature of the community (Peters, 2004, p. 90). In a way, Philo did succeed in bringing one prominent branch of Judaism around to his way of thinking, but it seems unlikely that he could have foreseen the impact that his writing would have as a template for the allegorical analysis of scripture for what, in his life, was a young messianic Jewish cult.
Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian and apologist is notable for his contributions to the understanding of the events of the Great Revolt, offering insight into not only the military events but also providing the account of a cultural insider comfortably existing as a mediator of Jewish culture for the Hellenistic world. His works Antiquities of the Jews and Contra Apion demonstrate his commitment to his heritage and validating that community within the Roman world. Perhaps a bit more so than Philo, Josephus seems eminently concerned with the status of Judaism and approaches his arguments in its favor differently, resorting to a more accessible speech than Philo. Considering that Philo did not live to see the destruction of the Second Temple, it stands to reason that Josephus was undoubtedly impacted by these events in a way that Philo could not have been. In Book I of Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus takes on an almost gentle pedagogical tone when recounting the text of Genesis. He makes very little attempt to intellectualize the material, but rather he simplifies the text and expounds as he feels necessary.

Moreover, Moses, after the seventh day was over begins to talk philosophically; and concerning the formation of man, says thus: That God took dust from the ground, and formed man, and inserted in him a spirit and a soul. This man was called Adam, which in the Hebrew tongue signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth, compounded together; for of that kind is virgin and true earth. […] whereupon Adam knew her when she was brought to him, and acknowledged that she was made out of himself. Now a woman is called in the Hebrew tongue Issa; but the name of this woman was Eve, which signifies the mother of all living.

Here, Moses is again painted in a philosophical light, but Josephus makes no effort to philosophize himself or extrapolate deeper meaning from the text through allegory. His recounting is straight-forward, rarely deviating in terms of content from the source text. Josephus clearly differs from Philo, who seemed to be simultaneously courting the opinion of both Jewish and Hellenistic intellectuals, whereas Josephus is addressing a non-Jewish audience and attempting to explain the fundamentals of Jewish culture without any assumption of familiarity with source material. Having born witness to the catastrophe of the Great Revolt and its immediate aftermath, Josephus is aware of the imbalance of power in his society and assumes a role as a translator of Jewish culture in Roman society. It also perhaps stands to reason that the simple language of his text belies an understanding of higher philosophical concepts because there is little call for reconciliation between Roman high culture and the Jewish religious tradition in the wake of defeat. In Contra Apion Josephus seeks to convince his Roman interlocutor, not only of the validity of Jewish antiquity, but also the uniformity of Jewish belief.

Among us alone will be seen no difference in the conduct of our lives. With us all act alike, all profess the same doctrine about God, one which is in harmony with our Law and affirms that all things are under his eye. (C. Ap. 2.81)

In spite of the sectarian movements within Judaism and the social fractures surrounding the Great Revolt, Josephus presents an unadulterated tradition. It is not clear from the text whether he earnestly believes in a unified Judaism or not; Danial Boyarin (2004) suggests that the answer would depend on how Josephus understood the use of words he employed to describe theological differences in other works (p.53). It seems, given the timing of Josephus’ writing less than 30 years following the destruction of the Temple, that there could be no true uniformity of spiritual response to the destruction. Josephus’ claim would seem to fly in the face of modern scholarship which argues for a wide and wild set of responses to the defeat of Jewish political expectations and the destruction of the Temple (Peters, 2004, p.30). The emergence of a separate Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity as well as the increasing frequency of apocalyptic and messianic expectations would suffice to indicate a disjointed Jewish communal identity. Within the text there is an unbending concern with the orthodoxy and purity of Jewish belief, community and reliance on the Biblical Law; while strict adherence was not new to Judaism, it is telling that in describing the whole of the Jewish people he focuses on that element of common custom which would come to define Rabbinical Judaism. In this sense, Josephus perhaps offers a glimpse into one of the futures of the Jewish communal identity.

Cleaving to a new direction, the young Messianic movement of the Christians split from Judaism in the 1st Century CE. The church arising from the evangelical work of Paul of Tarsus became the standard bearer of the nascent faith. Paul often alluded to the text of Genesis to explain the new doctrine of Christian belief. In many ways, this new approach to theological inquiry is rooted in the same strategy as Paul’s contemporary, Philo. Both writers radically expand on the source text in order to validate a belief system which would appeal to both Jews and Gentiles. Both writers maintain an internal system of logic, but where they differ is that Philo seems concerned primarily with demonstrating the compatibility of the two traditions, whereas Paul seeks to radically redefine the Jewish tradition to appeal to Gentile converts as part of his “New Testament” (Clark, 2004, p.9). Paul’s rhetorical strategy establishes frequent binaries to generate a sense of balance in the faith. Whether this preoccupation with proportion is a result of Hellenistic influence or a product of Jewish dualism is difficult to say given the mixed nature of Paul’s various audiences receiving his letters. In Romans, Paul makes artful use of balance, presenting Adam and sin as a problem for which Jesus is the solution. He establishes Adam as the mortal conduit of sin and Jesus as the mortal conduit of salvation.

18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. 20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom. 5:18-21, NIV2010)

Perhaps most interesting in this passage is the characterization of Jewish Law. Paul recognizes the validity of the Law, in its place and time between Adam and Jesus. He goes so far as to confirm that violation of the Law is sinful. However, his argument establishes the Law not as a necessity of faith, but a stumbling block for the faithful. In essence, he is arguing that even though the Law represents the true desire of God, it is not the ultimate determinant of salvation. Through this reasoning the laws of Moses became secondary to the ideology of salvation, opening the doors of the Judeo-Christian tradition to the Gentiles (Peters, 2004). Peters (2004) attributes the inclusion of Gentiles into the Covenant to be the most likely culprit in the split between Jews and Christians, arguing that internal messianic and apocalyptic expectations relied on the Gentiles as a sort of literary other meant to contrast the Jewish people (p.26).

In his letters, Paul addresses all manner of spiritual concerns, particularly as they relate to the new Christian tradition as it stands in the context of both the Jewish and Roman worlds. The following passage from 1 Corinthians is highlighted by Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People (2010) as an example of Paul’s radical social agenda (p. 87), however it is also telling that even as Paul ushers in new standards of social conduct, he relies on a reestablishment of the applicability of the text of Genesis.

5 But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. 6 For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. 7 A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. 8 For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; 9 neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. 10 It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. 11 Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. 12 For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. (1 Cor. 11:2-12, NIV2010)

Ruden (2010) makes a compelling argument regarding Paul’s intention in this passage as being contrary to the Hellenistic custom of veiling and not a frivolous restriction being placed on the women of the early Christian community (p.88). She points to the custom of married and widowed women being expected to veil themselves in public and to the erotic perception of hair indicated in the writings of Ovid and Apuleius as a means of illustrating the context of a head covering in a prayer setting (p.87). Ruden (2010) contends that in the prayer space Paul meant to confer to women the honorary status of wife regardless of their actual social positions (p.87). This makes sense given Paul’s characterization of the faithful as promised brides to Christ.

2 I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. 3 But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2 Cor. 11:2-3, NIV2010)

If Ruden’s interpretation of Paul’s text is to be believed then the story in Genesis was appropriated by the Christian movement to establish not only a new theological structure, but also to address the everyday social issues facing followers. Given Paul’s assignment of Adam and Jesus as mortal conduits of sin and salvation, then the women were being dressed as Eve and being made wives of Christ in the Hellenistic fashion. Paul’s analogy would eventually be construed into the symbolic relationship between ascetics and Christ as evidenced in Evagrius Ponticus’ 4th Century text Advice to a Young Woman (nuns).

Virgin eyes will see the Lord.
And with their ears will virgins hear his words.
Lips of virgins will kiss their bridegroom. (Maas, 2000, p.156)

In this passage, the notion of spiritual betrothal reflected in the writing of Paul has been refined and repurposed to apply only to the most devoted adherents of the faith. Jews of the same period drew on these same ideas of purity, in fact their traditions were virtually identical between the mainstream Jewish communal mores regarding virginity and marriage and the Christian ideal of celibate brides of Christ. The primary difference highlighted by Boyarin (1999) is that Jewish girls, in literature, were preserving their virginity for virtuous mortal marriage, preferably to a Rabbinical scholar, whereas Christian ascetics preserved their virginity for a divine union (p.88). Given the expectation of pre-marital celibacy in both Christian and Jewish communities, literary and ritual celebrations of holy virginity can be seen as synecdochical stand-ins for the overall spiritual fitness of the society within the group narrative; in reality, the fact that unwed women were virginal should not seem shocking or particularly special for the time period. It seems that only in the context of physical virginity standing in for spiritual or ritual purity does the chastity of unwed women become exceptional.

The 1st Century writings of Paul, Philo and Josephus are helpful in understanding the trajectories taken by their faiths in Late Antiquity, pointing to cultural and spiritual developments that would define later movements within the Judeo-Christian faiths. The changes were not instantaneous, and it stands to reason that none of these men ever perceived any contradiction in their own Jewishness, having each in their own way reconciled their Jewish past with their individual present states. Paul in particular paved the way for Late Antique discourse as a spiritual leader. His writing was the foundational canon of the New Testament and his works helped to reconcile the Jewish tradition in a way that was satisfying to the emerging non-Jewish Christian community. He is perhaps the most influential figure in the establishment of the Christian church and doctrine, having affirmed the applicability of the Old Testament to all followers of Christ and having rooted his present into the respectability of the past to create an unbroken chain of divine intention.

In the Late Antique world, scholars readily drew on the story of humanity’s fall from grace to bolster support for their world views. The period is particularly interesting, because it offers a time in which Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism were certainly formed, but not necessarily uniformly codified. This period saw the rise of heresiology within both Christian and Jewish communities, as factions struggled for primacy in the debate over orthodoxy, identity and cultural borders both within the community and the larger population (Boyarin, 2007, p.26). For both groups this struggle, in many ways, emerged from the rise of Christians into political power. Jews were under threat of assimilation and Christian sects wanted to be recognized, as they felt they rightly should be, as the one true tradition fit to be employed throughout the Christian Roman Empire.

The Gnostic texts found at Nag-Hammadi are particularly revealing of the variety of religious belief flowing from the uncertainty of the 1st Century into Late Antiquity. At the time of the formation of the extant gospels, other religious traditions were arising contemporaneously and amongst those, the texts found at Nag Hammadi perhaps represent some of the most radical repurposing of the Biblical text of Genesis; such striking revelations overturn any notion of an early unified Christian church (Pagel, 1989, xxii). Some of these writings recast God of the creation story as the villain and the serpent as the bringer of truth. The following text, from The Testimony of Truth presents the story of the fall of humanity from the point of view of the serpent.

But what sort is this God? First he maliciously refused Adam from eating of the tree of knowledge, and, secondly, he said "Adam, where are you?" God does not have foreknowledge? Would he not know from the beginning? And afterwards, he said, "Let us cast him out of this place, lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever." Surely, he has shown himself to be a malicious grudger! And what kind of God is this? For great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know him. And he said, "I am the jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three and four generations." And he said, "I will make their heart thick, and I will cause their mind to become blind, that they might not know nor comprehend the things that are said." But these things he has said to those who believe in him and serve him!

And in one place, Moses writes, "He made the devil a serpent for those whom he has in his generation." Also, in the book which is called "Exodus," it is written thus: "He contended against the magicians, when the place was full of serpents according to their wickedness; and the rod which was in the hand of Moses became a serpent, (and) it swallowed the serpents of the magicians." (NHC IX3)

The position of serpent is, if the term can be forgiven, devil’s advocate: a questioner of all of the assumptions of the nature of God using seeming inconsistencies of God’s character in the text. While modern scholars, as previously detailed, are able to demonstrate that these inconsistencies are born of the merging of texts a thousand years before the Gnostic literature came into being, these imperfections in the Biblical narrative must have manifested suspiciously to these readers, seeming to contradict the popular Judeo-Christian narrative. The Testimony of Truth is unique amongst the other commentaries thus far discussed, because it invokes the Biblical text with skepticism and critical analysis. While it too relies on authorial intent, it certainly does not recognize the infallibility of God as an apriori fact, quite the contrary since they believe that the intent of the author is to actively deceive the reader. They do still re-affirm the text canonically by the assertion that it contains a hidden truth behind the narrative, thus preserving its value and relevance to the community. Peter Brown (1971) describes the period between 170CE and the ascension of Constantine in 312CE as a period of religious unrest and reformation (p.49). Given the conditions of the age, including an economic and political crisis in the empire during the 3rd Century and Diocletian’s Great Persecution, then it should come as no surprise that religious groups experienced an upwelling of dissatisfaction and inquiry regarding usefulness of certain traditions. Even from the perspective of the persecutors their world was falling apart and the designation of Christians as a scapegoat must have held a certain appeal in that, for some, served to validate the sanctity of their traditions and reinforce bonds in the pagan community. In that regard, the Gnostic movements of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries represent the quintessential projection of religious angst in a world seemingly overrun with evils. Christians were alienated from the broader community and were, in this time of illegitimacy within the empire, largely relegated to local and regional levels of organization. These regionalisms, like genetic bottlenecks, bred the heretical debates that would rock the Christian Roman Empire as these widely dispersed groups came together and realized that each of their one true faiths had manifested with remarkably different understandings of the divine. The Gnostic reading goes further in its recasting of the Biblical roles, specifically addressing this passage from Numbers.

6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived. (Num. 21:6-9, NIV2010)

[…]for the one who will gaze upon this bronze serpent, none will destroy him, and the one who will believe in this bronze serpent will be saved." For this is Christ; those who believed in him have received life. Those who did not believe will die. (NHC IX3)

Jesus, in this role, becomes the serpent and the deliverer of truth and knowledge. He becomes the adversary of evil and ignorance, and the guardian of the secret path to enlightenment and salvation.
Gregory of Tours also retroactively inserts Jesus into the Garden of Eden, though not as the serpent. In Gregory’s A History of the Franks Jesus is again associated directly with Adam, drawing on the Paul’s logic introduced in his letters.

In the beginning the Lord shaped the heaven and the earth in his Christ, […] And while he [Adam] slept a rib was taken from him and the woman, Eve, was created. There is no doubt that this first man Adam before he sinned typified the Redeemer. For as the Redeemer slept in the stupor of suffering and caused water and blood to issue from his side, he brought into existence the virgin and unspotted church, redeemed by blood, purified by water, having no spot or wrinkle, that is, washed with water to avoid a spot, stretched on the cross to avoid a wrinkle. These first human beings, who were living happily amid the pleasant scenes of Paradise, were tempted by the craft of the serpent. They transgressed the divine precepts and were cast out from the abode of angels and condemned to the labors of the world. (Gregory of Tours, p.21)

By the time of Gregory, the analogy formed between Jesus and Adam had taken on a whole new life. Paul’s original intention was arguably a radical social reorganization that did away with class and marital distinctions within the place of prayer (Ruden, 2010, p.88), but by the end of the 4th Century the analogy seemed reserved for those engaged in the spiritually elite practices of asceticism. By the 6th Century, in Merovingian France, the western Roman Empire had fallen and competition had arisen between the eastern and western branches of the church, and Gregory writes of the “virgin and unspotted church”, which in this context would seem to have taken prominence over Jesus’ mortal companions. Undoubtedly, Jesus’ mortal brides are folded into Gregory’s understanding of the sprawling body of the church, but it is the institution and not the individuals who matter in this refiguring. The analogy presented here forms a more complex and broader understanding of the parallels between Jesus and Adam established by Paul, in that the role of woman has been co-opted by the institution and as Eve came from Adam and led men into temptation, the Church came from Jesus and will lead men into salvation. The narrative presents a satisfying affirmation of the institution of the church which had grown politically powerful under the Roman Empire and had survived as an institutional vestige of into the relative chaos of Western Europe’s medieval period. This emphasis on the institution over the individual serves to place the church squarely in the role of intermediary between mortals and the divine, eliminating the personal intimacy implied by Paul’s marriage of the women of his congregation to Jesus Christ.

Even dealing with such a small subset of the larger library of Biblical commentary the task of analyzing the permutations of even one Biblical story reveals a diverse mutative tradition with an imposing number of potential sources. While this paper has focused primarily on sources within the Christian tradition, much work can be done to further illustrate the role canonization plays in identity formation and social positioning. Gregory of Tours’ is a satisfying place to end this particular line of inquiry into the evolving role of Genesis 1-4. Offering a changing narrative stretching from the time of its canonization during the First Temple Period as a product of high culture under the auspices of the kings of Judah, to Paul’s analogizing the natures of Adam and Jesus to challenge social mores, to the fixture of that belief within the community of the faithful and finally to have Gregory point to it as a means of justifying and legitimizing a powerful elite institution in a vastly different cultural environment.

The research presented here is by no means comprehensive. Further avenues of address should include a more robust sampling of mainstream Christian primary sources from the 3rd and 4th Centuries, Jewish commentary from the 2nd Century onward as well as Islamic exegesis contemporary with later Christian and Jewish writings. Additionally, expanding the scope of “original” Biblical texts could reveal other relationships and points of comparison important to the understanding of the creation of identity during the formative years of the Judeo-Christian faiths.
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Would You Like to Fry in Hell With that Shake?

2010-05-05T18:03:00.001-04:00

This is a paper I wrote for my Late Antique Monotheism Class, I changed the title for web publication. I wasn't really happy with the way it turned out; I had a LOT more I wanted to say on the issue, but with a looming deadline and other school worries... well, it is what it is...
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It is popular sport to compare modern America to Rome, usually as a warning of impending collapse, an illumination of a seemingly obvious arc that demonstrates the simplest rule of gravity: what goes up must come down. This analogy generally points to a singular, though admittedly broad, cause for Roman collapse: sin. Though the word itself often goes unsaid, it can be recognized by its semi-euphemistic replacements: excess, overindulgence or any number of other words which speak to the widespread vice of the Romans. These terms conjure up a society conquered by the evils of alcohol and promiscuity, one so consumed with Bacchanalian orgies that it forgot to govern itself and could not be bothered to trifle with rampaging barbarian hordes. This historically suspect account of the fall of the Roman Empire circulates in American culture as a matter of convenience, casting a popular modern cultural anxiety as the villain in a sort of post-Christian morality tale. Of course, this is not to suggest that Christians and Jews living under Roman rule viewed their contemporary governments as being free of excess; on the contrary, the criticisms of Church fathers and rabbinical voices of Late Antiquity provide not only the basis for this limited understanding of Rome’s fall, but they also form the ideological foundation for modern anxieties surrounding sin and its effect on social stability. Of course, the anti-Christian Gibbonian response to the patristic narrative is an equally unsatisfying portrayal of Christian influences on Roman civilization as parasitic and culturally foreign. Both of these interpretations, the positivist and the Gibbonian, suggest that Judeo-Christian thinking was ideologically separate from the secular management of the state and its resources. Recent scholarship surrounding Late Antique society and identity have done a great deal to frame these ancient religious scholars within the context of their times. When these critics are viewed as an organic extension of their society they are revealed as objects of comparison in their own right, parallel champions of a question of orthodoxy preserved down through the labyrinthine meanderings of the prototypical Christian heart. By comparing Late Antique ascetic voices with the religious and dietary movements of nineteenth century America I will demonstrate that the spiritual anxieties established during the formative years of Christianity were very much alive and well as spiritual concerns in the early modern American mind, and I will further demonstrate the persistence of these views in modern popular culture. This approach seeks to position these social criticisms, from the Late Antique to the modern, firmly within a continuous genre of text and behavior that is first and foremost an internal cultural production.
The American evangelist and early dietitian Sylvester Graham began his career lecturing on the virtues of temperance in 1829, rising to national prominence through the 1930s; during this period he developed a comprehensive system to explain human physiology, one which asserted a direct correlation between health and the moral implications of food choice and sexuality (Nissenbaum, pg. 33). At the same time, the Shaker movement in America had grown to approximately 4,000 members living in celibate religious communes at its height in the 1830s (Foster, pg. 17). That same decade saw the Mormon founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. gathering supporters to his ministry, preaching a newly revealed religious testament; he was murdered by an angry mob in 1844. That same year, not far from Joseph Smith’s hometown, hundreds of Millerites gathered in a field to welcome the prodigal son of God, Jesus Christ, back to Earth. He was a no-show, but that did not stop many of the Millerites (henceforth referred to as Adventists, the largest surviving branch of the Millerite movement) from reformulating his return date, and eventually the very definition of what it meant for Christ to return in order to rectify their observations with their messianic expectations. What about this period brought about fresh apocalyptic discourse, new bouts of prophecy, persecution and martyr narratives, and newfound interest in asceticism and the widespread fetishism of dietary regulation? Lawrence Foster and Stephen Nissenbaum, studying sexuality in pre-Civil War religious movements and Sylvester Graham respectively, both seem to point to the emergence of the market economy in Jacksonian America and the uncertainty of the shift from rural subsistence culture to a more dynamic economic system which incorporated wider regional commerce systems and the abandonment of the household as the primary producer as chief cause of spiritual anxiety (Foster, pg. 5; Nissenbaum, pg.5 ). While I do not dispute the impact of economic systems on the daily lives of the common people, I am less inclined to fully ascribe the success of these movements to a Marxist understanding of class dissatisfaction within a community marginalized by its inability to compete in emerging regional agricultural markets (namely, northeastern farmers versus Ohio valley farmers). While this localized depression and fracturing of family units in favor of labor mobility in the emerging industrial society might explain the penchant for communal living amongst these emerging movements as an economic response, they do not necessarily satisfy to explain the extreme religiosity of these groups. I would instead point firstly to the larger instability of the new American nation, not much older than most of the early adherents to these movements, with its rapid expansion and recent history of violence (the War of 1812 undoubtedly serving as a watershed moment in the lives of many of these religious leaders) possibly contributing to a lack of meaningful national identity or fear of state collapse while at the same time opening up the promise of new beginnings and territory in which an ideal polity might arise. Secondly, I would argue that the desire to establish a more perfect society in the religious sense has been a continuous endeavor within Judeo-Christian communities at least from the time of Late Antiquity onward, whereby a religious group seeking to achieve an earthly spiritual perfection separates itself from a larger population to achieve a closer connection to divinity; in that sense, these new movements arose as the ideological heirs of a distinctly (though not uniquely) American colonial ambition which traces its roots back to those first Puritan communities to establish themselves on the Atlantic coastline. That these particular movements also arose at a time of vast reimagining of territorial interrelationships and economic change should not distract from the fact that this issue of cultural purity was an ongoing cyclical pursuit predating the market economy and, for that matter, Marxist analysis of class relationships. Therefore, I think it best to describe these movements as long-standing conventional Judeo-Christian responses necessitated by contemporary existential challenges. This genre would, in fact, fall into a broader category of identity narratives formed in response to external stimulus. So, to explore this in terms of a less specific response I find it helpful to form a weak analogous relationship between Late Antique Christian Rome and 1800s Christian America.
The weakness of the American national identity, though manifest in these nineteenth century religious movements, is perhaps better demonstrated by the growing gulf between the northern and southern states which would eventually lead to the American Civil War. The uncertainty of the political and economic climate at this time in the United States is perhaps comparable to the tenuous position of Rome in Late Antiquity from the Third Century Crisis onward. Further extending, and perhaps straining, this metaphor one could argue that early colonial America most closely resembles the newly Christianized empire following the ascension of Constantine. Both periods are marked by an establishment of religious agency for Christians in the form Constantine’s legitimization of Christianity and the de facto freedom of religion in colonial America which was later codified by the First Amendment clause preventing state sanction or prohibition of religion; this factor coupled with the possibility of governmental collapse in the 1800s as a result of internal struggle or outside invasion perhaps encouraged the people to cleave toward religious identities rather than political ones in spite of secular empowerment. This is a superficial comparison, but one which illustrates comparable conditions under which certain struggles for orthodoxy might arise. It is telling that following Constantine’s rise to power that a Christian church which had been at least nominally united in purpose and common suffering quickly fractured into a wide array of competing Christianities, each trying to gain popular and state support for its brand of faith. The forums for the exchange and legitimization of Christian theology were the ecumenical councils initiated by Constantine in an effort to mandate uniformity throughout the Empire in effort cultivate a valuable cultural resource. Lacking a governmental entity to drive debate the early American churches competed exclusively for public support, which of course carries real political capital in a democracy. In Joseph Smith’s telling of his pre-prophetic struggles with choosing a denomination he describes the spiritual tension present in his community during his adolescent years:
Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester [New York], there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. It commenced with the Methodists, but soon became general among all the sects in that region of country. Indeed, the whole district of country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties, which created no small stir and division amongst the people, some crying, “Lo, here!” and others, “Lo, there!” Some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist. For, notwithstanding the great love which the converts to these different faiths expressed at the time of their conversion, and the great zeal manifested by the respective clergy, who were active in getting up and promoting this extraordinary scene of religious feeling, in order to have everybody converted, as they were pleased to call it, let them join what sect they pleased; yet when the converts began to file off, some to one party and some to another, it was seen that the seemingly good feelings of both the priests and the converts were more pretended than real; for a scene of great confusion and bad feeling ensued—priest contending against priest, and convert against convert; so that all their good feelings one for another, if they ever had any, were entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.[…] In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it? (Smith)

This scene is more than slightly reminiscent of the souring of early Christian communities under Constantine; in both cases, most if not all of the sects perceived common cause in the Christianization of the people, but once the ideological terrain was established the participants found their portions lacking and proceeded to attack rival organizations. Though Smith describes a relatively local spiritual revival, I would argue that these questions of faith arose in the historically puritanical New England as one of many responses throughout the fledgling nation to the larger condition of the state. The conflict itself is more or less comparable to the increasing arena of ideas in Late Antiquity which featured regional disputes played out on an empire-wide stage. These sectarian behaviors would seem to indicate that differences of belief and practice are tolerable until such a point that organizations are forced to compete for limited resources (money, political influence, believers and so forth). While this does invoke a Marxist approach to competition over resources, I think it important to note that these group identities were engaged in complex economies that defy simple class designation incorporating both material and spiritual currencies; each group certainly saw itself as being spiritually rich or elite by virtue of purity, but ultimately the spiritual debates tended to be won by those who engaged it with material means, as demonstrated by the hefty bribes paid by Cyril to officials in Constantinople to ensure the success of his theological position, or the active legal persecution of Mormons as an insurgent group in Missouri (Maas, pg. 123)
Having established a passable analogy through which to illustrate the larger socio-economic factors in the New England religious revivals and Late Antiquity which might have spawned broader questions of identity in these distant Christian communities, I would like to further narrow these responses to the reemergence of uniquely Judeo-Christian narratives. Which is to say that, given the above circumstances, particularly in the light of emerging regional identities evidenced by the eventual secession of the American Confederates, the struggles these Christian groups engaged in were not purely theological in nature. First, I would like to address persecution narratives which, though not purely Christian, occupy a prominent position in the larger Christian narrative. The animosity unleashed in Late Antique councils held by newly liberated Christians from the point of view of a challenged would have seemed nothing short of a persecution. Gregory of Nazianzius, at the time Bishop of Constantinople and a supporter of the ultimately victorious Trinitarian view of God, described the manner in which he was challenged by his opponents in no uncertain terms, “[…]They were like a swarm of wasps suddenly darting up in one’s face and, far from attempting to chasten them, the august assembly of elders actually joined the demonstration.” (Nazianzus, pg. 123). Joseph Smith’s account of local early opposition to his prophetic pronouncements is virtually identical.
[…]though I was an obscure boy, only between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and my circumstances in life such as to make a boy of no consequence in the world, yet men of high standing would take notice sufficient to excite the public mind against me, and create a bitter persecution; and this was common among all the sects—all united to persecute me.

The similarity of established narratives in these two periods indicate a strong continuity of response in Christian communities to questions of orthodoxy, both internal and external to innovative groups. Specifically of interest are the indictment of the “men in high standing” and “the august assembly of elders” who engage in the petty shouting down of righteous men clarifying the will of God. This can be directly correlated to the earliest Christian challenges of entrenched Judaism, with the Pharisee challenges to Jesus and his apostles.
Paul looked straight at the Sanhedrin and said, "My brothers, I have fulfilled my duty to God in all good conscience to this day."At this the high priest Ananias ordered those standing near Paul to strike him on the mouth.[…]The dispute became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces by them.(Acts 23:1-10)

In this uniquely Christian sense, it is not enough to be challenged by the young and foolish, but to be persecuted by the supposedly wise elders leading the community away from salvation. This urge to position Christianity as a battle against entrenched falsehoods is continuous throughout Christian history even when those narratives pit the larger Christian community against itself; those seeking to innovate or reform assume a Christlike identity in the face of a corrupt Pharisaic body. The adoption of these Christ-like identities is especially important in the ascetic tradition of Late Antiquity, and is further reflected in the practices of 1800s American religious attitudes. Though not unique to Christian practices, these devout religious groups actively participated in the colonization and sanctification of public space through the formation of isolated communities in which members could engage in a form of group spiritual purity. These communities, in both times, establish a space in which all aspects of social commerce were approached from a religious standpoint. On the grander end of the scale there are the recurring attempts to re-colonize Jerusalem in an effort to approximate or realize the Christian apocalyptic notion of the heavenly Jerusalem on Earth. Robert Wilkens’ The Land Called Holy describes this surviving Christian connection to a physical Jerusalem as “[…]an irreplaceable sign of continuity with the first Christian community and with Christ[…]”. In this sense, the reclamation of Zion serves to connect Christian communities with their past and by extension to that original promise of salvation given by Christ to the faithful. In Late Antiquity, this amounted to the transformation of Jerusalem under Constantine into a physical Christian Holy Land complete with Churches marking the locations of milestones in the life and resurrection of Jesus. This desire can be seen further played out in the colonization of desert space outside of Jerusalem by Christian ascetics attempting to sanctify the public and personal aspects of society. In the early modern movements these upstart religious movements certainly formed their own communities in the public space through the foundation of new churches and church hierarchies, publications, whole communities (in the case of the Shakers and Mormons), and in the case of the Mormons the foundation of a full-blown independent theocratic state cast in the mold of Jerusalem and ruled by the Earthly prophet (and successor to the martyred Joseph Smith) Brigham Young in the Utah territory… until the United States Cavalry peacefully asserted United States authority over the region. These are but a few examples of the uniquely Christian narratives to survive into the formative period of modern American culture, but these Biblical expressions also arrived part and parcel with other notions established in Late Antique which have their roots in the Biblical exegesis of the period.
In highlighting specific concerns for purity derived from extra-Biblical narratives in Late Antiquity, I hope to demonstrate that anxieties surrounding personal purity survived into modern times, transmitted through the ages by Christian thinkers, though not necessarily codified by canonical scripture. Thus I am hoping to demonstrate the continuation of a uniquely Christian ascetic narrative both within and separate from the mainstream narrative which resurfaced in the popular thinking of Jacksonian America. The accounts of the lives of saints in early Christian literature there is a recurring theme of temptation or challenge by dark forces frequently taking the form of—though certainly not limited to—the following “vices”: women, food, alcohol and money. All of these concerns can be explained through biblical passages, however, of particular note is the connection that some of these objects have in the Late Antique mind. While many cultures possess a communal knowledge of aphrodisiacs, ranging from oysters to bull testicles to I the aptly named horny goat weed, Late Antique thinkers—perhaps drawing on Hellenestic medicine or Jewish table law or some combination of the two—developed a complicated worldview surrounding the relationship between food and sexuality. In these communities there was, among other things, a link between fasting and virginity, the idea that one’s body could be more chaste through the denial of fleshly concerns. Late antique interest in virgin spiritual language combined with notions of fasting, which in turn are likely partly derived from Greco-Roman medical ideas about healthy dietary habits which linked the perceived properties of food to their likely effects on the physical body (to include sexual effects), led to an inextricable tie between spiritual health and bodily purity governed by stimulation. The direct correlation between gluttony and lust are present throughout Christian ascetic literature; Basil of Ancyra pointedly provides the following warning:
[…]through the sense of touch in tasting—which is always seducing toward gluttony by swallowing—the body, fattened up and titillated by the soft humors bubbling uncontrollably inside, is carried in a frenzy toward the touch of sexual intercourse. (Shaw, pg. 85)

Outside of the Christian community in Late Antiquity a competing dietary tradition existed amongst the Germanic tribes which would one day overtake the Roman west. This excerpt from Einhard’s Life of Charlegmagne can perhaps make the differences between Late Antique Christian attitudes toward diet and early medieval Christian traditions clear:
His meals ordinarily consisted of four courses, not counting the roast, which his huntsmen used to bring in on the spit[…]he was moderate in the use of wine and all sorts of drink that he rarely allowed himself more than three cups in the course of a meal. (Einhard, pg. 59)

Perhaps it’s not fair to apply this meal to the modern conventional division of meals between breakfast, lunch and dinner, but there is a very stark difference between dietary habits of what would become the ruling class in Christendom and the early monastic movements… which isn’t to say that those movements did not persist, but simply that the popular culture carried on with the notion that rich food and vitality were good things. How strange then that more than a thousand years later that a self-appointed doctor and registered minister should be diagnosing all the physical ailments of Jacksonian America as debility brought about by imperious dietary habits that provoked lust in the hearts meat-eaters everywhere creating a physiological imbalance(Nissenbaum, pg. 127). It should come as no surprise then that as Sylvester Graham was championing his purer dietary systems, the feverous religious movements of the same day began to incorporate his teachings into their own. Joseph Smith, as early as 1833, had begun incorporating ideas promoted by Graham into Mormon doctrine.
Use of wine, strong drinks, tobacco, and hot drinks proscribed; Herbs, fruits, flesh, and grain are ordained for the use of man and of animals; Obedience to gospel law, including the Word of Wisdom, brings temporal and spiritual blessings. (Smith, Sect. 89 ln. 1-21) Today, a large number of Adeventists still practice vegetarianism.
It is often easy to distinguish overtly religious responses in our society; however, there are times when these reactions are so deeply coded into the fabric of our culture as to not be readily apparent. I am particularly interested in how these ideas transform over time to adapt to new generations and new, even contradictory, attitudes. Few people would consider eating a hamburger to be a particularly sexual act, and yet our pop-culture has preserved the notional link between gluttony and sexual deviance. What constitutes gluttony has certainly changed, as has what constitutes sexual deviance. In 2009, two movies were released in which female bodies were being remotely controlled in sexual situations by obese men. In one of the movies, Gamer, the man is actively eating a sandwich while forcing a woman to have non-consensual sex with similarly controlled human avatar named “Rick Rape”. Over the years, the food has gotten unhealthier, the sexual deviance has gotten more deviant and the gluttons have gotten more glutted, but the message is the same and not one most Americans would recognize or even correlate to religion. In this sense, we can place the preservation of Late Antique Christian responses in to three basic categories: those which are tied to a need for generic identity, those specifically tied to biblical identity narratives and those which persist as specific ideas. All have carried on in one way or another into modern times, and in all likelihood will continue to carry forward whether we recognize them for what they are or not.

Adam Blue and the Bastard Boys of Fedaliya

2009-11-05T13:40:00.001-05:00

This are the first five pages of a chapter in progress. I am nowhere near happy with it yet. So consider that a warning.

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Chapter 11

Night, Day 40: Adam Blue and the Bastard Boys of Fedaliya

The buildings in Fedaliya emerged from the sparse landscape like cracked clay pots; ragged mud walls framed the crumbling family compounds which had been loosely tossed over the landscape by the blind architects of momentary convenience to create a winding community of intermittent, populous and filthy estates. The gaps between these tiny fiefdoms were clotted with refuse, makeshift shacks and stagnant pools of water ranging the entire spectrum of spent automobile fluids, giving the entire impoverished Shiite neighborhood the feel and appearance of an occupied landfill. The passage between Fedaliya and the abutted, and only modestly better to do, community of Kamaliya was a rough and serpentine unfinished thoroughfare sitting atop a large dirt fill, comically referred to amongst Americans as “Dead Cow Road”, a name the locals seemed determine to immortalize by dragging their dead livestock up the steep slopes on either side to rot in the open air. The intended effect was two-fold: to dissuade Americans from entering the neighborhood and to make apparent their disgust with the broken incinerator they had once used to dispose of trash and that same ruined livestock. Their passive-aggressiveness failed to accomplish either of these ends. The soldiers charged with the daily patrols had grown accustomed to the stench and relished the opportunity to ferry unsuspecting officers, those who had grown bold enough to temporarily venture from safety of their swivel chairs on the FOB to test their mettle, through the putrid corridor.
At night, in the absence of an electric grid, the only sources of public lighting were the headlamps of American humvees and the flickering fluorescent bulbs bolted to the side of the Al-Kinani Beverage Market and Husayniya. It was a singular self-sufficient oasis, a one-room, concrete building bisected by a tarp to separate a small and reverent worship area from crowded shelves of dry goods and a single humming refrigerator filled to bursting with cans of juice and soft-drinks. With its steady supply of junk food and illumination, the shop was a popular destination for Fedaliya’s more listless, less well to do inhabitants: which is to say, most of them. The hubbub of activity made for a convenient stopping point for visiting Americans to connect with the locals, quench their pallets and generally jam an obtrusive thumb into what was in all likelihood the asshole of Baghdad.
Adam’s squad and an Iraqi interpreter, Buster, stood like hunched vagrants at the shining cultural nexus of that asshole, leaning against a tattered mural of Mohammad Sadiq Al-Sadr on the east facing side of the beverage market.
“I’ll tell you what, you know, when I went out on patrol with the armor guys last week I saw the weirdest fucking thing.” Jane glistened with sweat in the balmy night; her eyes were dark and plump from lack of sleep as she stepped away from the wall to address her companions.
“So there we are, down in Sumer Al-Ghadier, really nice neighborhood, sort of walled off with Ministry of the Interior roadblocks. Apparently, there’s some Iraqi high up there and he’s got guys in street clothes armed with AKs just standing around and looking tough, and he had a bunch of private bodyguards hanging out, fucking goons, biggest goddamn Iraqis ever. But anyway, we’re there and I see this dude on the other side of the roadblock looking over a fence, and here’s the thing… he doesn’t look Iraqi. You ever see an Asian hanging out on the street? I bet you fucking haven’t. Well, we go over and start trying to talk to this guy, and he doesn’t speak English or Arabic. Why? The motherfucker’s a Chinese national, just chilling out in Baghdad. What the fuck are the Chinese doing here?”
Sergeant Alcott’s spun to face his soldiers. A candy bar fell to the earth, a plume of dust rolled outward from the site of impact. Alcott bobbled quickly toward the group from the semi-circle of trucks providing security for the dismounted soldiers. His massive frame was made even more imposing by his protective vest and the huge assault pack slung across his back.
“Why didn’t you tell me you caught spy, Sergeant? Goddamn inter-fuckin-national espionage, that’s what that was. Anyone say what the interrogators got out of him? Probably some sort of wonton eatin’, commie superspy. Good job, Davenport, nothing gets by my soldiers. Highly trained. Combat ready.”
“We let him go.” Jane shrugged. “He wasn’t doing anything.”
Alcott’s jaw dropped. Cowboy slammed his hat against the horizon and let out a drunken holler. The two were stunned. Cowboy collected his rage first.
“Dagnab, woman! How you gonna go and let the Red Chinese slip outta yer hands! You listenin’ to this horseshit, Adam? What’s she mean he weren’t doin’ nothin’? He was there weren’t he? He was bein’ Chinese plain as day weren’t he? Since when don’t that constitute somethin’ ain’t right? Need him to hand ya a fortune cookie says, ‘Golly, miss, I been up to some no good commie bullshit’n tryin’ to destroy yer way of life’ or somethin’? Hot damn, that gets me riled.”
“What do you mean he wasn’t doing anything? Did you search him, did you search his house?” Alcott spat a brown lump of cud at his feet, it splattered on his toe. “Anything?”
“No, he was just standing there. We asked some of the neighbors and they said he was a fixing satellite service or something. It’s not like I was in charge, they said leave it alone. I did.”
“Satellitin’ yer goddamn location right back to them goddamn Maoist cocksuckers!” Cowboy’s face flushed, thinking about far away pandas and all the evils they embodied.
Alcott drew a hand up to the side of his head, blood pounding in his ears, his mind skirting a terrible realization: the Chinese had turned American Army officers against their own government.
“Davenport, come here. We need to talk offline. Get in the truck.” Alcott grabbed Jane by her sleeve and led her away from the group.
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“You guys been taking dumps off the side of the tower or something?” Lieutenant Brenard called over the push-to-talk radio clipped to Peter’s chest.
Peter grasped at the radio, tugging it from its perch.
“Maybe, why?”
Peter had been put in charge of the squad communications. This all important social distinction primarily came about because Peter had lobbied Brenard personally, pitting the Platoon Leader’s hatred of Alcott against every reasonable objection to having to listen to Peter’s incessant and often distracting diatribe against the social injustices perpetuated by the American military industrial complex.
“You got some kids eyeballing the fuck out of you. Where’s fatty going?”
“He’s all worked the fuck up because Jane let a Chinese super spy get away.”
“What?”
Peter thumbed the transmitter, letting static pour over the connection for a moment to create a sense of the dramatic.
“Word on the street is he’s smuggling the secret location of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Only one man can keep all those pork wontons out of terrorist hands.”
The occasional clever wise-crack at the expense of Alcott and Alcott’s blubbering inexpressible rage at the political content crackling through the device filled Brenard with such a deep satisfaction that he couldn’t help but intercede and buck the tried and true system of giving the coolest shit to the people with the highest rank. By all rights, the radio should have gone to Jane. The only time this system of distribution could be bypassed was when, as in Peter’s case, a soldier had immediate access either through social privilege or by virtue of job position. This common supply loophole explains why soldiers busy prosecuting the war outside the American barbed wire encampments often had to make do with substandard equipment, while soldiers who were in charge of distributing new gear were armed with state of the art implements of war. Often one could determine a soldier’s proximity to the supply chain simply from the accoutrement festooning his or her rifle. Peter was proud of the number of widgets screwed into his gun, not so much because they made him a more efficient killer as for the fact that they clearly illustrated his gilded position within the military social hierarchy. Alcott often glanced from the bareness of his own rifle to the cluster of infrared lasers, high-powered scopes, ergonomic handgrips and personalized slings crowding the actual functioning parts of Peter’s rifle with disgust and wonder. The brand-spanking-new bipod affixed to Peter’s barrel was left ever open and extended for all the world to envy, the firearm equivalent of a shameless public hard on. It was a hard on equivalent that Alcott couldn’t look away from.

Autogenesis: The Terminator and the Art of Self-Conception

2009-10-26T12:28:00.003-04:00

I feel like this could still use some tweaking. I was limited to about 4 pages, so I couldn't cover everything I wanted to say. If it seems like I leave a point shy of fully explored, I apologize. If you can think of ways to change it without changing its length, I'm all ears. The last sentence is sort of in place-holder status right now--I haven't fully settled.
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It takes no great act of intellectual gymnastics to draw a reasonable connection between the elements of James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and what can be euphemistically called a woman’s technology of choice. In the film, a machine disguised by a biological human exterior travels into the past in order to “terminate” Sarah Connor’s unborn child, John Connor, who happens to grow up to lead a post-apocalyptic resistance against the robot overlords: a job he can use to pad his resume at Kinkos once the mechanical-ragnarok settles down. Apparently, freedom fighting is a tough to market skill set, but nobody deals with a broken copier like John Connor. Now, an attempt to justify that tangent: John’s mother is the copier, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is the ultra-buff cyborg sent from the future to blast her toner cartridge apart with a shotgun. The Terminator’s globally scaled technophobic nightmare centers on the control of one working class woman’s reproductive equipment, a narrative which on the surface appears to present a heroine breaking away from a life of mediocrity to overcome impossible odds and seize mastery of her genitive processes away from a terrifying embodiment of an oppressive patriarchy. Closer examination of the gendering of the film’s characters reveals a far less liberating subtext, one which puts to question how our culture chooses to frame reproductive technologies and the evolution of gender roles in the modern world.

The unseen driving force behind the Terminator’s hunt for Sarah Connor is the enigmatic Skynet, the artificial intelligence responsible for the future near-extermination of humanity. Skynet itself is a non-gendered entity; its apparatus of interaction in the film is a hulking visually imposing male figure. Of course, the maleness of the Terminator itself can be called into question: is gender defined by appearance or motivation? As a machine, the Terminator does not possess a “male” mind, but rather a gender neutral mind. It seems unlikely that the cyborg’s appearance bears any relation to Skynet’s sense of self; rather, it draws on a cultural understanding of what is intimidating. This could be a formulation on the part of the artificial intelligence, but the decision to mold a cyborg specifically designed to infiltrate the tattered remains of humanity in the shape of a looming six-foot-two bodybuilder appears a bit conspicuous and as such seems to be a somewhat impractical decision for a super computer to make, pointing instead to a preference of human origin: that of the film makers. So, ignoring the aesthetic display of masculinity—a mask really—Skynet and its Terminator ultimately exist as a technology with a singular purpose in the film: to usurp authority over Sarah’s baby-maker and stop it.

If the Terminator is an instrument of abortion and Sarah Connor the film’s everywoman, then one of the implications presented is that abortion is harmful to every woman; a point driven home by the cyborg’s murder of Sarah’s mother and all the Sarah Connors in the phone directory. All these women, by virtue of their alikeness, are essentially unidentified casualties of a conflict surrounding motherhood and reproductive decisions being waged by forces situated beyond the periphery of knowable existence.

Time travel in The Terminator aside from being a practical method of naked transportation between two points, provided those points are separated by time instead of space, also works as a form of what Petchesky describes as womb surveillance. The characters from the future possess special knowledge of Sarah’s unborn child. The importance attached to this knowledge upon delivery, that she must save her own life and secure her role as mother, anchors her to a destiny which she has had no part in devising. The case presented by the male hero, Kyle, mirrors the function, argued by both advocates and opponents of abortion, of a sonogram in that it is meant to bond the woman to her progeny through the anthropomorphizing of the fetus, even going a step further by assigning the unborn child a name and purpose. Kyle is also represented as a human opposite to the machine hunting Sarah down, a rescuer, but his mission is no more liberating than the Terminator’s, both present the same binary option: embrace motherhood or face catastrophe. If Sarah does not have a reasonable opportunity to self-assign gender roles, then with whom does the power actually rest and whose power is threatened by the cyborg? At the start of the film, Sarah is merely another Sarah Connor, one of many on a list, and only through embracing the goals of a traditional patriarchy, a cultural institution built largely on the management of the female genitive process, can she be fully realized in the fictional world of The Terminator. Cameron’s narrative establishes an illustrative, if paradoxical, cycle of womb administration as a reproductive custody passing from father to son to father, the mother first surrendering to the ambitions of the father and then deferring to the son’s wishes. John Connor’s implied manipulation of his own conception breaths vivid life into the sometimes tired and overly-speculative art of diagnosing an oedipal complex.

John and Sarah, when judged in terms of free agency, make for more interesting foils than Kyle and the Terminator, who act only on behalf of another’s will utilizing imperfect knowledge of Sarah’s womb-destiny to steer events. Sarah is by far the least powerful figure in the film, acted upon by agents of entities not yet existent, devoid of special intimate awareness of her body, and forcibly assigned the role of motherhood. John, on the other hand, is the most powerful character in the story, having all but defeated Skynet—the only other entity capable of orchestrating actions based on knowledge of events situated in Sarah’s future—and having self-defined to what should be an impossible degree of specificity. John Connor is his own maker whereas Sarah is made, defined by a family line over which she has no authority.

The Terminator presents itself as a cautionary tale of technology gone awry, claiming free agency for women and trumpeting the defeat of a masculine archetype. Instead, it makes a case for what every woman should want: a benevolent patriarchy which bestows upon her a precious baby boy to maintain the continuity of human existence. John Connor is, through his own paradoxical origins, an immaculately conceived savior with no clear beginnings; when he looks back over his own history he does not see the agency of others but rather the workings of his own hand. He is a sort of modern divinity reasserting the power of men over life and death, invoking a mythical tradition of male parthenogenesis to defeat technologies which threaten patriarchal order. The film recasts gender neutral forces, giving technology a sinister goal and appropriating the feminist understanding of the enemy as a hyper-masculine bogeyman in order to achieve a pseudo-feminization of the womb-management of the classical patriarchy by presenting a female character as being strong in the face of an invented mutual enemy. The Terminator generates an argument against reproductive technologies that it cannot possibly lose, because who sides with killer robots?

Where are the Greek Villains?

2009-06-26T12:31:00.003-04:00

Where are the Greek Villains?

Greek mythology introduces a pantheon of heroes, superhuman beings capable of performing impossible deeds, unbound by human limitation. Modern narratives typically dictate a force in opposition to heroism: villainy. Often the Gods and heroes themselves are embodied as agents of both forces. Gods punish wantonly, demanding vengeance, blood, destruction and sacrifice from those who offend them; heroes slaughter entire cities kit and caboodle for the sake of glory and treasure. While morality certainly does exist within the scope of Greek literature, the characters are reflections of an imperfect world capable of good and evil. Perhaps one of the keys to reconciling the context in which a laudable hero can commit acts of treachery and wholesale slaughter is an understanding of the one-world model of Greek mythology. The gods do not inhabit some other plane of existence, but rather make their homes at the peaks of mountains and within the temples of their favored cities and islands. While their domains are rarely accessible, they are present in the lives of mortals. Even the land of the dead can be reached by a particularly bold traveler. The entire spectrum of being existed in this mutually shared space. A world model which does not separate goodness from evil into meaningfully distinct camps precludes the creation of villains as they appear in modern works.

In order to advance this argument, it must be first demonstrated that despite the fact that many of these tales are born of a more distant past, they do actually reflect the world view of the Classical Greek audience. Within the texts of the Epic Cycle there are repeated indications that the events occurring are not contemporaneous with the poet. The opening invocation of the muses indicates a lack of firsthand knowledge in the matters being discussed; after all, why should a poet need to invoke a minor goddess to tell him how to describe an event he bore witness to? (Carpenter, 24) Archaeological findings confirm the separation between the Mycenaean Greek origin of these myths and the Classical Greek cultural prism through which modern readers interact with them. The degree to which Homer, as an Archaic or early Classical Greek, is capable of detailing the warriors’ impedimenta and the architectural style is doubly significant in that he describes them in great specificity and equally great historical inaccuracy. The implication is that he substituted what he knew for those things which he either did not know or did not see value in repeating. (Carpenter, 31) It stands to reason then, if Homer altered the story to reflect details which would be familiar to a Classical Greek audience then he likely emphasized or introduced themes which would also resonate culturally. Though these myths may be the product of another age, the form encountered by modern readers is certainly one which was intended for, and therefore reflective of, Classical Greek audiences. Were the opposite true, then The Lion King and West Side Story might be called accurate portrayals of Shakespearian drama, an assertion unlikely to win praise in any scholarly circles.

Having established that these texts were composed with a Classical or pre-Classical Greek audience in mind, it becomes necessary to turn to the works of Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days to define the nature of the Greek cosmos. Greek cosmology occurs entirely within the scope of that which is observable; Hesiod describes all of existence, excluding that which is generated exclusively by the yawning nothingness of chaos, as the product of the Earth and the Sky, everything in existence lies between. “In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth[…]And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods.”(Hesiod, “Theogony” ln.116-126) The Earth, Gaia, created a domain in which the Gods would dwell, and by extension the creations of the gods. Within the Greek tradition, the Gods take on a decidedly anthropomorphic form, reflecting successive familial lineages stemming from the origin of existence, leading to an ordered cosmos under the rule of Zeus. (Clay, 13) Within this existence the gods create humankind, which takes on varying permutations through the ages as the divine powers apparently attempt to get the formula right. The final incarnations of the human race, the races of heroes and iron, would seem to blend into one another, a progression characterized by a diffusion of the divine stock present in the gene pool. (Clay, 93) This distinction between the mythological races of men is vital to the Classical Greek understanding of Homer’s works, as the mortal characters belong to the race of heroes and the audience to the race of iron. It is additionally useful in illustrating the mixture of good and evil within their world. “For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.” (Hesiod, “Works and Days” ln.176-179)

The fact that Homeric characters exist in a world without absolutes helps to explain why Hector, the mightiest Trojan warrior in the Iliad, with his perfect filial loyalty and prowess in battle can also stiffen out of fear at the thought of fighting Achilles. It can also serve to explain how Athena, the goddess of wisdom, can engage in trickery to convince him to fight Achilles by posing as his brother and successfully goading him forward with the prospect of victory through dirty two-on-one tactics, only to disappear, abandoning him at his final moment. Hector’s lapse of courage and brief abandonment of honor do not rob him of his heroic status, nor do Athena’s actions make her monstrous, instead it fixes them within the framework of functioning singular cosmos. In this sense, Greek mythical figures, though exaggerated, are made compelling by their realism, as opposed to exemplifying a purely static and impossible ideological archetype. Ancient Greeks allowed for the possibility that their heroes might, in certain circumstances, behave badly. This is not to say that these characters go without judgment, on the contrary, the gods constantly weigh the virtues of their actions and mete out punishment as they see fit. The gods, being themselves imperfect, often appear heavy or light-handed in their verdicts. The magnified scale of Greek mythical figures often results in an almost absurdist system of crime and punishment. Within a single story one might find both a hero, Odysseus for example, who is guilty of genocide and is sentenced to slowed return home, waylaid by the inconvenience of erotic extramarital episodes with divine beings. In that same tale, one also finds a group of lousy houseguests, at worst guilty of conspiring against the host, who are met with wholesale slaughter. These inequities of justice are reflective of a reality which is not always fair to its participants. It should be noted that, in spite of obvious favoritism in the distribution of justice, proportionality is essential to the Greek concept of virtue versus guilt. In a world without purely manifested ideological extremes, the sum of a character’s actions determines his or her fate. A person who has done more evil than good is subject to divine wrath, whereas a character that is largely virtuous is likely to be reprieved. In the Agamemnon, Clytemnestra can be seen as just for killing her husband out of vengeance for the duel crimes of sacrificing their virgin daughter to Artemis for the sake of sacking Troy and the utter destruction of Troy itself. However, the fact that she is also an adulteress who, along with her lover, profits from the execution by usurping the kingdom dooms her. The righteousness of her actions is outweighed by the evilness of her intent. Had she been otherwise virtuous she might have escaped punishment. Orestes, her son, in killing her, balances the crime of matricide by avenging the murder of his father.

In an ethical system founded on the principle of doing more good than harm, true redemption does not exist. A character cannot achieve spiritual forgiveness, they can merely stave off the wrath of the gods by not pushing so far beyond the bounds of acceptable conduct that divine favor completely abandons them. This is reflected through the competing agendas and judgments of the gods. Odysseus, to his credit, manages to appease most of the gods, but consistently brings down the wrath of Poseidon on himself and those around him. Judeo-Christian monotheism differs in that divine forgiveness is absolute; this is reflected in the clear separation of mortal and divine affairs with the deity existing on another plane of being. Absolute goodness exists in Heaven and absolute evil exists in Hell, the mortal realm exists as a testing ground, but eternal forgiveness or damnation are uncompromising ends to which a mortal can aspire. A polytheistic one-world cosmic model differs from a monotheistic multi-world model because one offers an eventual release from the dictates of knowable existence, while the other anchors the soul to the mortal experience. Monotheism offers two possibilities, complete bliss and complete suffering, whereas the Greek system delivers the dead into a grayish limbo which is, at its finest, reflective of Thesiod’s view of the best possible life—a balance of good and evil.

Aristotle’s work Poetics provides modern scholars with a significant insight into the workings of Greek narratives. In this work, the philosopher considers the nature of the tragic narrative as well as tragic elements of the Epic Cycle. His work helps modern readers to distill the elements of Classical Greek narratives valued by those chronologically proximate to the texts.

Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear […] There remains, then, the character between these two extremes—that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. (Aristotle, “Poetics” ch.xiii)

This Aristotelian view of tragedy conceives it as a narrative detailing the downfall of a person who is neither completely virtuous nor wicked, one who is not brought to ruin through sin but rather through miscalculation, ignorance or inability which leads to a tragic turn of events. At the risk of contradicting earlier assertions regarding the moral balance of characters, it should be noted that Aristotle seems more concerned with the shocking immediacy of a narrative’s turn of events than the justness of the circumstances. (Jones, 14) Central to Aristotle’s argument is the idea that human beings are caught in the snare of fate or circumstance, in which case the morality of the participants is a secondary consideration dictating the action (response), but not necessarily the outcome. This concept can be seen to function in a variety of ways in Classical Greek narratives; the most accessible example is perhaps those warriors of the Iliad who are destined to fall in combat. Patroclus is slain because he ignores Achilles’ warning to not venture too far into battle, his mistake is hardly relevant since Apollo orchestrated his death at the hands of Hector. The role of Patroclus’ actions in this case becomes negligible since it is divine will which decides his fate. Beyond the maneuvering of mortal and divine characters within the text it is clear that Patroclus’ death serves the narrative function of drawing Achilles into battle, turning the tide of war. A direct corollary can be therefore be formed between the divine will present in the text and those things which occur to advance the narrative. Returning to the question of morality in regards to the actions of Athena and Hector, his timidity in the face of danger and her ignoble methods become nearly immaterial byproducts of fate and artistic design. In order to avoid the somewhat conspicuous contradiction between the previous claims made regarding the balance of morality and the endorsement of Aristotle’s view of the dramatic form, it becomes necessary to refine the primary argument being made. The ancient Greek world, while wholly contained within a single sphere of existence is not egalitarian in nature; fate always takes precedence over mortal ambitions. Therefore, the miscalculations of characters which are often presented as poor moral decisions serve to deliver them to their fate. The simple fact that they are destined, in the narrative sense, to make a particular choice does not preclude them from being judged.

It is fitting, having moved from discussion of a one-world cosmic model to Aristotelian dramatics, to briefly address the ontology of 5^th century BCE Athenian philosophers. Firstly, the work of Plato is a two-world metaphysical model consisting of physical and metaphysical existence. The actual distinction between these planes of existence does not divide the world in a way which meaningfully damages the properties of the one-world existence previously mentioned. Plato’s two-world model separates perfect from imperfect concepts, and while he would surely argue that all perfect concepts are “better” than their imperfect counterparts, it is doubtful that he would consider them inherently “gooder” since a concept can exist in perfection without existing in a state of goodness. This separation of pure divine concepts from impure mortal concepts advances the argument that the Greek cosmos was hierarchical in nature, even outside the domain of folklore. Aristotle, Plato’s student, returns to a one-world ontological model in his Nichomachean Ethics, thus returning the divine to the immediate human experience. Aristotelian virtue relies on a concept of proportion and moderation, essentially systematizing the traditional Greek worldview to reflect a clearly defined ethical system. Returning to the fallen warriors of the Iliad, Patroclus and Hector, when their cases are applied to the Aristotelian definition courage, their actions can be further explained.

Now the brave man is as dauntless as man may be. Therefore, while he will fear even the things that are not beyond human strength, he will face them as he ought and as the rule directs, for honour's [sic] sake; for this is the end of virtue. […] Of the faults that are committed one consists in fearing what one should not, another in fearing as we should not, another in fearing when we should not, and so on; […] The man, then, who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and from the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave; […] the man who exceeds in confidence about what really is terrible is rash. […]The rash man, however, is also thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage; at all events, as the brave man is with regard to what is terrible, so the rash man wishes to appear; and so he imitates him in situations where he can. […] The man who exceeds in fear is a coward; for he fears both what he ought not and as he ought not […] The coward, the rash man, and the brave man, then, are concerned with the same objects but are differently disposed towards them; for the first two exceed and fall short, while the third holds the middle, which is the right, position. (Aristotle, “Nichomachean Ethics” book iii, sec. 7)

Patroclus, in defying Achilles’ warning, demonstrates brashness in the face of danger; he puts on Achilles’ armor and imitates his courage in battle, but ultimately falls short of the Greek virtue of bravery because he chooses not to demonstrate reasonable fear of danger. Hector is not a coward by this Greek definition as the fear he harbors is reasonable given Achilles’ prowess in battle. By choosing to face Achilles he demonstrates moral virtue. It could be argued that his momentary willingness to abandon honorable combat is indicative of cowardice; however, the fact that he stands his ground against his opponent even after Athena abandons her ruse illustrates his true nature. The mere act of considering dishonorable action in the face of certain death does not, by Greek standards, make him a coward.

The ultimate effect of the Classical Greek worldview is the production of works devoid of true villains. At most two mythical figures might find themselves in opposition to one another, each performing virtuously in accordance with their own telos. This absence of ideological extremes is brought about by the formulation of a world view which does not subscribe to the concepts of absolute good and evil, but is more mindful of the orderly procession of a hierarchal existence. This relegates morality, in the sense that it applies to good and evil, to a secondary consideration mediated by circumstance and divine necessity. This worldview is not completely removed from modern audiences, but rather quite close to the reality which we exist. Though modern western thinkers would like to consider themselves virtuous creatures driven by a desire to perpetuate a greater good, the reality is that seemingly moral decisions are rarely absolute. These choices are made on the basis of a limiting ideology centered on the self, the social unit or the political unit. Frequently, people are called on to make decisions which benefit one group over another, and while these actions may not be called evil, they are likewise not wholly good. Ancient Greek narratives embrace this ambiguity of action, accepting that individuals and groups often work in their own interest at the detriment of others. Perhaps the modern constructions of heroism and villainy are manifestations of a deep cultural denial which seek to conceal the failings of absolutist thinking by inventing a world in which a human being can act in an irreproachable and categorically impossible inhuman manner.

Works Cited

Aristotle. (c. 350 BC) Poetics (S.H. Butcher, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt>

Aristotle. (c. 350 BC) Nichomachean Ethics (W.D. Ross, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.mb.txt>

Carpenter, Rhys (1962). Folktale, Fiction and Saga. Los Angeles: University of

California Press

Clay, Jenny Strauss.(2003). Hesiod’s Cosmos. New York: Cambridge University Press

Hesiod. (c. 350 BC) Theogony (Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Hesiod/hes.th.html>

Hesiod. (c. 350 BC) Works and Days (Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Hesiod/hes.wd.html>

Jones, John. (1980). On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Palo Alto: Stanford University

Press

Why Not Update?

2009-06-16T18:20:00.003-04:00

I feel alright today. That's good.

Where am I? I suppose that's more or less an irrelevant question to ask on the internet, a place that is not fixed, which can be conjured to any location with a wire and an electrical pulse (but seems most at home in places that serve espresso.) To answer that question which may not have needed asking, I am alone in my apartment--procrastinating. Taking my time getting to writing a small fleet of papers for school, holding my breath for a serviceable novel to appear on my screen, I just finished watching The Devil Wears Prada (it was free OnDemand, and came out in the last two years... I jumped out of survival instinct, it wasn't bad.) But where am I? I am situated sometime in between here and there, here being where I was when I started, whenever that was, and there being where I'll end up when I finish, wherever that will be. Location, in this sense, is not reflective of geoposition, but rather life position. Which is to say, like the internet, I'm all over the place no place all at once.

I don't understand people of any stripe. I can parse them: motivations, wants, failings, virtues. I can appreciate them. I just don't understand how the core of one person can be so different from another. If people were volcanos, I would be a snow capped mountain. Sure, I'm not likely to blow anyone up, but no one is going to turn on the news to see what I do next... at most I might humble those people stupid enough to suffer my pointless jaggedness.

Anyway, once these papers are out of the way, I've got some promising notes on new material for the book.

Environmental Factors, Order and Chaos in Late and Post-Victorian Literature

2009-06-14T20:55:00.002-04:00

Here's something to "entertain" you. This is a paper I wrote for a literature class, a topic I am by no measure qualified to speak about.

One can say, with no measure of doubt, that a particular work cannot be both exclusively pertinent to a singular era while also transcending the passage of time to inform and engage modern readers. The writings of Ibsen, Mann, and Conrad persist in their relevance beyond their simple revelations as historical texts reflective of their Late and Post-Victorian origins by exploring topics which invite speculation outside the purview of the period allotted to them by the sweeping hands of history’s keepers. This is not to say that these works are not products of their time, but rather that the extremity of the overarching aegis of the Victorian Era was such that it provoked in these writers an urge to address the philosophical assumptions of their day, assumptions which were not by any means unique in a historical context, but were elevated to such a point of social import whereby they became virtually synonymous with the age. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, explore the relationship between the axis of order and chaos versus the axis of goodness and evil in relation with the human experience through the eyes of individual Victorian characters. Each author in his own way challenges the western preconceptions which tie goodness to order and chaos to evil by stripping away the veneer of good and orderly existence to reveal the absolutist correlation between these axes to be an artificial construction divorced from the actual human condition within the reality of Victorian culture and beyond.

The Role of Travel and Geography

In shaping each of these works the authors took care to juxtapose the austerity of Northern European cultural standards of order against more viscerally passionate locations to the south: Italy in the case of Ibsen’s and Mann’s work, and Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. These locations serve not only as a cultural manifestation of Victorian strictures or the lack thereof, but also as a metaphorical bridge between geography and anatomy. The northern origins of the characters identify spatially with the brain, the supposed source of Victorian superiority and civilization: intellect, stoicism, Apollonian thought and western refinement. The north to south travel of the principal characters can be seen to correspond with an acknowledgement of, or awakening to, Dionysian impulses manifested at least partly in all cases with sexuality; thus this travel can be viewed as a shift in the anatomical center of thought downward from the head to the sexual organs. This change in locality also manifests itself as a change of atmosphere from cool to warmer climes. In A Doll’s House, Nora and Torvald’s trip to Italy, occurring prior to the story, is made evident through Nora’s fiery tarantella dance to provide a contrast against the frigid Norwegian winter. Heart of Darkness similarly opens beneath the oppressive darkness of London’s overcast sky and quickly thrusts the reader into Marlow’s sweltering account of Africa, home of Kurtz’s wild mistress and all the primal energy Conrad assigns to its thick jungles. At first glance, Mann’s Death in Venice, would seem to defy this pattern by placing the protagonist Gustav van Aschenbach in an unseasonably warm and humid Munich to begin with and then moving him to an unusually dreary and cool Venice; however, when viewed not as a comparison between the physical temperatures of the locations but rather as a contrasting indicator of the relative heat or passion of Aschenbach’s temperament as he moves between these environments, one can further assert the importance of the imagery of environmental temperature change in demonstrating the effect of location on the character. Assuming for the use temperature as a metaphorical representation of passion, Aschenbach, as he appears in Munich, is cooler than his surroundings; this is an allusion to his status as an exemplar of stoic ideals. It stands to note that amongst a society which reveres his mentality, he is set apart by his unusual lack of romanticism. His relative warmth in Italy signifies the stirring of a suppressed and excessive desire, one so great that it defies the capacity of a city as symbolically romantic as Venice.

The Role of Illness and Its Link to Food

Having asserted the role of temperature imagery in advancing the common thematic elements of these three texts, and having similarly identified the role of individual temperature in the case of Aschenbach, it is only natural to extend this to an analysis of the role of fever specifically and disease in general within the context of the Victorian sentiments which manifest themselves in the writers’ works. In each of these texts, disease (a manifestation of both passion and disorder) plays a two-sided role as a liberator of social constraints and as a potentially lethal killer.

In A Doll’s House, Torvald’s illness, which precipitates most of the events in the play, is cured through travel to Italy’s warmer climes which, as previously noted in relation to her dancing, results in an awakening of a sense of unusual passion within Nora. The circumstances by which the trip was made possible, Torvald’s illness and Nora’s subsequent forgery of her father’s signature on a loan document, further demonstrate the good that can arise from a state of disorder. Torvald’s position of financial executor is hampered by his disease, but Nora is able to overcome the problems facing her marriage through a criminal act of forgery which both cures her husband and quietly liberates her from Victorian social expectations. The collective cultural repertoire from which these three authors drew contained more than a few concepts which might be alien to the modern reader. Not the least amongst them, the widely held belief that disease was the result of unnatural sexual and culinary appetites advanced by the American temperance leader Sylvester Graham[1]. This causal link between food and disease is most directly formed in A Doll’s House, wherein Nora and Rank discuss the nature of his fatal illness.

“Rank. My poor innocent spine has to suffer for my father’s amusements.

Nora. I suppose that you mean he was too partial to asparagus and pate de foie gras, don’t you?

Rank. Yes, and to truffles.

Nora. Truffles, yes. And oysters too, I suppose?”

Rank. Oysters, of course, that goes without saying.

Nora. And heaps of port and champaign. It is sad that all these nice things should take their revenge upon our bones.” (Ibsen, 38)

While on the surface, this brief dialog might seem to the modern reader to subtly hint at sexuality, the actual connotation within the context of the time is much more significant given the outspokenness of the Grahamite movement during the Victorian era. Nora’s shift in topic from the unseemly frankness of the sexual act to euphemistic dietary habits opens a window of opportunity for the two to speak flirtatiously. Rank personalizes the discussion by alluding to Nora’s personal vice, macaroons, by mention of their confectionary cousin the truffle. In this light, the macaroons which Nora secretly hides from her husband, but flaunts in front of her friends, come to represent a hidden sexuality which Torvald is not party. Nora’s mention of oysters, a reputed aphrodisiac, advances the sexual dialog by linking a specific food to the act of sexual intercourse. Torvald’s overbearing enforcement of order and strictures within the house results in two evils: the suppression of his wife’s passions and her intellectual infidelity. The balance of relationships are directly upset by Torvald’s strict adherence to social mores; thus Ibsen is able to demonstrate that order does not always yield goodness and that goodness, Torvald’s good health and Nora’s self-actualization, can be born from disorder.

Mann similarly links food with disease in Death in Venice by having Aschenbach ignore warnings about eating fruit which might be contaminated with cholera. Fate takes a more sinister turn for Aschenbach who is compelled to expose himself to disease by the unbridled passion he feels for Tadzio. His decision to stay in the city and partake of luxury foods in spite of the growing epidemic is indicative of the irrationality of his passion which manifests to such an extent that he allows himself to be corrupted by agents of disorder to offset the imbalance of his life. Through Aschenbach’s classically inspired reasoning Mann is able to show the arbitrariness of social order in the context of differentiating between good and evil acts. At the same time, he recognizes through Aschenbach’s eventual death the inherent dangers of completely ignoring prudence. Aschenbach’s fever is indicative of his growing passions and also the onset of cholera. Again, temperature plays a role in expressing the character’s inner motivations and desires. As Aschenbach grows sicker, so too does his appetite for sex and disorder: his feverish dream of the bacchanalian celebration and its phallic idol and his musing on the adventures to be had with Tadzio once the rest of the city had succumbed to disease are both manifestations of the corruption in his mind and body. The fact that he succumbs to the disease of his desire for the boy is not necessarily an indictment of disease or desire, but rather a charge levied against the living of an imbalanced life. Aschenbach’s tale demonstrates the inevitable destructive spiritual backlash against the stoic Victorian ideal. The prediction set forth by Mann’s depiction of Aschenbach was perhaps vindicated by the excesses of the post-war 1920s and the subsequent economic failure of the 1930s, a rise and fall mirroring Aschenbach’s own journey from direness to disaster by way of elation.

The role of disease in Heart of Darkness is not as internal to Marlow’s experience as it is to Aschenbach’s in Death in Venice, nor as integral to his motivations as the characters in A Doll’s House. Rather, the lurking diseases of the jungle serve to mirror the psychological effects of Africa’s alien environment on its European colonizers. The specter of sickness shadows Marlow’s journey from the outset, a threat which provides a constant reminder that whites are unwelcome intruders. The depiction of natives as direct extensions of their wild environment serves to further illustrate who belongs in the Congo or perhaps more appropriately: who belongs to the Congo. “…but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.”(Conrad, 21). This passage was similarly noted by Dr. Achebe in his essay An Image of Africa as an example of Conrad’s fixation with assigning value to cultural presence of location (Achebe, 122). This depiction of healthy Africans interacting seamlessly with their environment is both complimented and complicated by the image of Africans brought inland by Europeans to work, who upon leaving their homelands succumb to many of the same maladies as the whites they accompany. Still, even in their similarity to Europeans they are depicted as being separate, closer to the primeval wilderness.

“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light…” (Conrad, 27)

“Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost to uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”(Conrad, 28)

This is perhaps one of the few places in Heart of Darkness where Conrad offers a gray area, a position between the polar opposites of black and white, between African and European cultures. Africans acting outside of their environment are stricken with disease, just as Kurtz is later in the novel. If Conrad means for Africa to represent some primal otherworld to Europe’s civilization, then the disease afflicting both Kurtz and these dying Africans serves as a warning to the reader about the dangers of upsetting the natural order. At the same time, Conrad depicts the possibility of free-agency within this hierarchal division between order and chaos, in at least as far as Europeans are concerned. The Central Station Manager’s uncanny ability to survive in Africa is highlighted by the uneasiness he instills in others, the sense that he is unnatural belongs to a nothing. Kurtz, on the other hand, is able to elect to exist temporarily within the Congolese world, embracing it and ultimately seeming to abandon the existence of order he was born into for one of chaos. Marlow is ultimately confronted with this same decision, at least in his own mind. His awe in the face of the jungle and its people’s passionate culture is tempered by his understanding of social arrangement. While it seems clear that Conrad, vis-à-vis Marlow, views African culture as being inferior when compared to its European counterpart, he does not recognize it as evil, but rather as an alternative suitable to those born to it. Upon his return to Europe, Marlow views those who have not experienced the choice between order and chaos as being uninformed, passive recipients of culture, inferior in their understanding of the human condition, thus tying enlightenment to having glimpsed both alternatives and chosen according to one’s nature. In Conrad’s work, the disaffection of evil from chaos and goodness from the order of civilized life further dispels the unnatural linkage between these two axes of ethics.

[1] “If it be admitted that the dietetic doctrines herein taught are founded upon correct principles, those who make such admission, and neglect a reformation, have much to answer for. Is there any reasonable difference between the man who shortens his life by intemperate eating or drinking, provided he be not ignorant of their effects, and he who terminates a miserable existence by the sword or the pistol? Have we a right so to conduct as to become the victims of disease? Do we not owe a duty to ourselves, to the community at large, and to our families, that renders it criminal when we voluntarily disable ourselves from fulfilling such obligations? Is a man justified in calling his friends around a bed of sickness, robbing them of their natural repose to minister to his wants, and afflicting their minds with his situation, when he might have avoided it? And even if we have, with the most virtuous courage, corrected the abuses of our own lives, have we accomplished our duty? Is it virtuous, is it just to transmit, to posterity, the diseases with which we, ourselves, are afflicted? Does it not devolve upon us as an imperative duty, to our progeny, to educate them in such a manner, that they may be capacitated to enjoy all the happiness, of which, by a perfection of their nature, they are susceptible? Are we not accountable for the health, morals, and happiness of our offspring?”(Graham, 29).

The Gotham Ethic

2009-04-25T15:45:00.003-04:00

This is my final paper for my philosophy class. It's a bit contrived, I admit, but done is done.

“Like the unfortunate madman who says he’ll climb down to Dovrefjell to blow up the whole world with a syllogism, what was needed was someone who could, to everyone’s knowledge, climb really deep down into the whole world of mediation, mediocrity and spiritlessness to plant there, for all to see, the explosive either/or.”

–Søren Kierkegaard, (Kierkegaard, 1852)

The Gotham Ethic

The world of Batman, as it appears in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, presents the viewer with a conflict between several competing and sometimes complimentary forces. The city of Gotham is firstly divided into two distinct groups prior to the introduction of the key characters. Each of these groups has its own code of conduct and social mores: the law abiding citizens of Gotham and the criminal underbelly governed by their distorted code of honor. Within the context of Gotham’s history, the Batman and Joker are relatively recent and radical newcomers who appear in the city as agents of change seeking to undo what they view as a corrupted or flawed social order. Each of these characters espouses an ideology that seeks to unseat the entrenched and stale status quo of Gotham and unify the city’s population through the establishment or disestablishment of order. At the end of the film it is unclear which ideology was victorious because both had suffered serious blows. So, to perhaps untangle the somewhat muddled conclusion to the tale it is necessary to determine which philosophy better serves its ends by studying the ethical ramifications of the intent, action and outcome of the story by comparing it with the philosophical theories of more traditional voices: Kierkegaard, Plato and Aristotle.

To start with, we can say that Batman and the Joker are philosophers since both characters have a clear desire to define and propagate a world view with a specific ethical system similar but not entirely identical to their respective camps of origin (again, law and order versus criminality). The dialog between the two characters occurs mostly through indirect means, each attempting to prove his theory through the reaction of Gotham’s citizens to their actions. Each of them adopts certain conventions from traditional philosophers in order to effectively present their world views. In some ways these characters transcend the role of philosopher in that they transform themselves into perfectly embodied symbols of their philosophies capable of assuming authority higher than that entrusted to those they impose upon. In this sense, the Joker and Batman can be viewed according to Platonic political thought as, if not Philosopher Kings as in The Republic (Plato, 360 BCEa), then as the near ideological cousin: Moderate Tyrants as in Laws (Plato, 360 BCEb). Philosopher Kings and Moderate Tyrants share many of the same virtues in Plato’s writings, the difference being that Moderate Tyrants arise as a means of political segue into a more perfect government whereas Philosopher Kings are a perfect state.

Viewing Batman and the Joker as Moderate Tyrants, one can better understand the struggle over the District Attorney Harvey Dent. According to Plato, in order for a Moderate Tyranny to become a perfect state the tyrant requires a skilled legislator.

“Cleineus: You would assume, as you say, a tyrant who was young, temperate, quick at learning, having a good memory, courageous, of a noble nature?

Athenian Stranger: Yes; and you must add fortunate; and his good fortune must be that he is the contemporary of a great legislator, and that some happy chance brings them together. When this has been accomplished, divine fortune has done all that it ever does for a state which it desires to be eminently prosperous.” (Plato, 360 BCEb)

Batman’s alliance with Harvey Dent was pivotal in almost completely eradicating the deeply entrenched criminal hierarchy that plagued the law abiding citizens of Gotham. Batman was poised to relinquish his power to a society governed by ethical laws in which a tyrannical vigilante enforcer was no longer necessary. The introduction of the Joker complicated this transformation of Gotham. The Joker sought to impose a different code of ethics and he recognized the need to destroy and usurp the relationship between his rival tyrant and the skilled legislator. In turning Harvey Dent against Batman and the order he sought to establish, the Joker effectively recruited him to impose his chaotic ethical system through the abandonment of law and order. Harvey Dent was important to both Batman and the Joker as the symbol of legitimate and consenting governance, in that he would rule Gotham by the grace of a people seeking out an ethical ideal as opposed to the Moderate Tyrants who would rule ethically by decree.

The use of secret identities by these philosophers to perpetuate an ideology stems from the need for the perfection of an ideological belief system to be delivered by means of a likewise perfect embodiment of that ideology in order to perfectly govern less perfect people. To reveal their identities would effectively tarnish the perfection of the ideas by tying them to the human flaws of their originators. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms in his writing performed an eerily similar function to Bruce Wayne’s use of the Batman identity to present his ideas: both men are wealthy and noted for their lavish lifestyles, and in order to be taken seriously both had to divorce themselves from the aesthetics of their social personas and adopt an unknown identity. The Joker too, wears makeup to maintain anonymity and frequently revises his personal narrative to confuse his origins. In that sense, the adopted identities remain always true to form in a way that their true identities could not. This is perhaps the same reason that Plato does not personally espouse his philosophy, but rather he attributes it to Socrates who, in death, becomes a perfect embodiment of the ideas free from the failings that a living Socrates might possess. It is perhaps this same reason that Batman and Commissioner Gordan are forced to conceal the collapse of Harvey Dent from the people of Gotham so that he can embody the philosophical ideal that the city should strive toward.

In terms of supporting the two disparate ideologies through the writings of traditional philosophers we can observe that Batman’s view holds up to scrutiny more readily than the Joker’s. Batman enforces justice day to day in Gotham; he is a relentless actor working to achieve philosophical supremacy in a constantly shifting environment in which success is achieved only so long as he is able to maintain his virtues. The Joker on the other hand seeks to prove the validity of his thinking through singular acts in which his unwilling participants are forced to make decisions which inevitably result in turning them against their own ethics. The Joker’s reliance on isolated acts to prove his ideology runs counter to both Aristotelian and Kierkegaardian thought in that it ignores the constant struggle to act virtuously in a changing world by presenting a moment for weakness to take grip and ignoring the entire scope of the subject’s existence. Kierkegaard would argue that one act, while romantic and aesthetically pleasing to the storyteller, the Joker, does not signify the larger truth of a person or validate the ideological narrative being related: in this case, anarchy and natural human wickedness or selfishness. “Then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.”(Kierkegaard, 70) Batman on the other hand, through a constant struggle seeks to instill a working ethic into the citizenry, to establish a habit of virtuous conduct that Gotham might live justly and not just act justly in specific circumstances. Where both characters succeed is in the Kierkegaardian sense of choice. “Do it or do not do it, you will regret both.” (Kierkegaard, 72) Batman is capable of making difficult ethical decisions because he is able to reconcile the regret he feels by knowing that he is acting virtuously and that his sacrifices ultimately benefit the city. The Joker, on the other hand, delights in pushing others into a choice that guarantees regret, though he is flawed in his thinking that the regret constitutes an admission of ethical failure. Additionally, the situations posed by the Joker do not meet Aristotle’s criteria for voluntary actions, as laid out in Book III of Nicomachean Ethics, since the agent doing the action is compelled to act by threat of violence to others. (Aristotle) The Joker does make effective use of Socratic irony in evidencing, if not proving, through their own actions that people are not as just or ethical as they believe themselves to be,

An informal straw poll of the internet, by way of search engine, reveals that a common theme viewers and critics feel is expressed in The Dark Knight is that evil triumphs over good. I suppose it could be viewed in that light since Batman failed to turn over the reigns of justice to Harvey Dent and thus usher in a more perfect state, Dent himself is destroyed, their mutual love interest Rachel Dawes is dead, the police force is shown to have been corruptible, Batman is perceived to have stepped beyond the bounds of his ethics and is hunted for crimes he was forced to accept blame for in order to hang on to the possibility that the society he envisions will come to be. Batman does, however, win some decisive victories over the course of the struggle. His position as a symbol of absolute virtue is transferred to the dead Harvey Dent, whose memory cannot be compromised in the same way that he was in life. His goal of bringing down the criminal underground in Gotham is furthered not only through his own actions, but also the destructiveness of the Joker’s philosophy since the Joker not only kills key members in the criminal hierarchy through his own actions, but also through the actions of the corrupted Harvey Dent, and he essentially bankrupts the massive criminal enterprise through robbery and the burning of their cash reserves. In that regard, the Joker furthered the means by which Batman seeks to bring order to the city by denying the criminal class of leadership and capital. Also, by Batman assuming the blame for Dent’s crimes he was also able to overcome the limitations of his own ethical code since criminals can no longer rely on the fact that he does not take lives in the pursuit of his goals. In the end, Batman was not able to achieve his ultimate goal of a more perfect state, but he is well poised to continue his crusade for order and the end of criminal rule in Gotham. The Joker can take solace in his corruption of Dent, but ultimately Batman retained his ethical footing on a personal level and prevented the Joker from completely undoing the means by which he can accomplish his goals.
Works Cited

Kierkegaard, S. (1909) Søren Kierkegaard’s Papirer. Copenhagen: Gyldendal (Original work published 1852).

Kierkegaard, S. (2000) The Essential Kierkegaard Princeton: Princeton University Press (Original work, Either/Or published 1843).

Plato. (c. 380 BC) The Republic (B. Jowett, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.mb.txt>

Plato. (c. 380 BC) Nichomachean Ethics (B. Jowett, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.mb.txt>

Aristotle. (c. 350 BC) Nichomachean Ethics (W.D. Ross, Trans.). Web.

< http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.mb.txt>

LNHFCOJ Update: Chapter 1... Again

2009-03-30T12:14:00.001-04:00

For those of you who have been following the project, this is probably about your fourth time or so reading this chapter. I resubmit Chapter 1.

Chapter 1

Late Night, Day 1: Adam Blue and the Eyes of the Cosmos

The universe flung itself to and fro, dramatically slinging its bits and pieces against each other. Galaxies collided, their spiral arms wrestling in a mockery of the spectacle in their midst. The petty rustling of mankind had drawn the curious eyes of the cosmos to a splintered desert nation. The icy fingers of death were snapping a catchy tune, and humanity was stomping and clapping in time with every ounce of enthusiasm it could muster.

---

The airstrip used by the Coalition Forces in Baghdad sprawled into the desolate quiet of the Iraqi night. Private Adam Blue stood airsick and stupid in the rough gravel pit on the east side of the tarmac. The far off lights of the Baghdad International Airport hung dully in the mottled black air like tallow candles creeping beneath the whispers of the full orange moon.

“Look at you, Adam. You and your friends look so brave.”

Adam squinted upward at the muffled sounds of adoration. He removed his ballistic goggles so that he might take in the full round face of his admirer. He could then see the charitable curve of her lips and he could know better the bunched lines formed at the corners of her eyes as she beamed down upon him. His hearing, however, was no better for it and so his own face held tightly to its pinched display of puzzlement.

“All of you are standing down there, dressed up like soldiers and looking so strong and fine. I am both proud of you and frightened for you.”

“Huh?”
“You look like heroes.”

“What?”

“Take out your earplugs, dear.” The moon mouthed slowly.

“Speak up, please.”

“Take out your fucking earplugs, Blue!”

Jane hammered a coiled fist against the back of Adam’s helmet, the meat of her hand bounced harmlessly away from his armored skull. He spun around to face his squad leader. It was clear from her forward leaning posture that the time for negotiations had passed and that Adam had squandered her patience. He complied.

Adam tugged at his ear protection and the silence was vanquished by a brilliant burst of sound: the world flooded with noise. Adam placed the tiny yellow buds into an empty grenade pouch. The shuddering of black hawk helicopters washed over him; their mighty rotor blades beating angrily against the dome of the sky. Adam could hear everything: voices, chewing gum popping, an enthusiastic breeze whistling through the slick barrels of machine guns, and he could hear the faint crackling of distant bamboo chutes. Somewhere far away, there were pandas chewing contentedly as they conspired not to fuck. He heard the murmur of a billion Chinese laughing at a dispirited American zookeeper who had grown weary of the lack of romance in his professional life. More immediately, there was Jane, open-mouthed, breathing in and out with quick irritated pants and waiting for Adam to speak.

It should be stated that Adam's brain was a nest of glistening madness, a lump of tissue riddled with pulsating veins and some fairly cockamamie ideas about the universe. Amongst them, the idea that things which were, were in fact not, and things that were in fact not, were. Over the years he’d learned to hide the fact that he was, for all intents and purposes, completely bat-shit insane.

“I don’t know. Maybe they just don’t like one another, Sergeant. I don’t know that it’s any of anybody’s business but their own. I don’t understand love.”

“What the fuck?”

Adam mused silently on the nature of love. It was a mystery to him. He knew that he loved, his heart was bursting with it. He loved the enduring beauty of existence and the goodness that the human spirit could do. Knowing how he loved did nothing to help him understand what it was that moved lovers and whether having that knowledge would allow one to move them. He worried that they might drift apart, individually repulsed by scripted third-party overtures. Love, he feared, was not bound by the romantic logic born of good intentions. The idea that love ‘conquers all’ was an unproven theory which, even if true, did not guarantee that love could be instilled through actions. This suspicion made the American agenda in Iraq seem that much more daunting and improbable. After all, if America couldn’t coax a couple pandas to get it on, what hope could they have to form a lasting national unity amongst the juxtaposed interests of historically opposed ethnic groups?

“I think we may have overstepped ourselves when we decided to manipulate hearts and minds. We should have gone after their hands; they’re a lot more predictable.”

“Again, what the fuck, Blue?”

“Well, it’s just that if you can control someone’s hands, it doesn’t matter what their heart feels or what their brain thinks because you control the actions. Of course,” Adam clenched his jaw against his realization, “then, again, you’ve caged the heart and what good can come of that?”

“Alright, that’s great. Ground you gear, grab your weapon and let’s go get some chow. I’m going to find Potter. Don’t forget your weapon.”

“So we’re fending for ourselves then?”

“How do you mean?”

“Hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“You told me to get my gun. What are we supposed to be hunting?”

“We’re not hunting anything; they won’t let you into the chow-hall if you don’t have your weapon.”

“Why?”

“Shut the fuck up, Blue. Are you hungry or not?”

“I am.”

“So drop your shit in formation. I’m gonna find Potter.”

“Roger, Sergeant.”

Jane dwelled, staring at him for a moment before turning back to the mob of soldiers shedding their equipment. She wove through their bodies, around the mounds of camouflaged bags and doodads, disappearing into the mass of soldiers. Adam trailed behind her, looking for his place in line. He scanned the name tags, each sequence of letters painting an intimate portrait of the other members of his platoon. Each name had a face and vice versa. Adam shucked himself, dropping his equipment in a heap next to the pile labeled ‘Potter’. This was his place, at the far left of the row, furthest from the seat of power in the squad which was denoted by one’s relative rightness to the other soldiers in the line. As far as the Army was concerned, Adam was always less right than anyone else in the unit, regardless of how wrong they might be.

Cowboy loomed above the formation. The old salt tipped back a shot of whiskey and wiped his whiskers clean. He tilted eastward on his dusty leather boots and let out a long hoot.

“Oooeee! Would you listen to them smug sons of bitches!” He sang in his western drawl. “Pandas! Chink sons of bitches think they’re so clever! Hidin’ their evil ways behind fuzzy faces. Like we’re gonna forget what they are on account of them exportin’ a couple critters. Cultural exchange? No thanks, y’all got nothin’ we want! Fuckin’ commies.” Cowboy snarled out the last word, pouring equal parts contempt and hatred into its syllables. Cowboy was stuck in the Fifties. In his mind, the Cold War raged on and pandas represented everything wrong with Sino-American relations.

Adam's brain was a soggy clump of crazy snapping off millions of electrical impulses at the speed of light. His brain couldn't slow down, it twitched and tangled as fast as teeth sparkled. With every breath he took, his mind spun circles through loopholes in outer-space. Cowboy stumbled through those hoops and curlicues. His breath wreaked of booze, his tongue stumbled over slurred advice. His grizzled face was all pins and needles and his chin quivered with lack of sensation; he was an alcoholic. No one had the heart to say so: not Adam, and certainly not the moon.

“Hey, darlin’. La Luna mon chair!” Cowboy called out, looking affectionately upon the blushing pock-marked face of the moon. He tipped his hat backward, his feet creeping slowly out from underneath him until he was forced to grab the massive seal of his belt buckle for balance. He hiked his dungarees up, pulling himself forward and grinning sloppily at the object of his francophonic flattery. The moon hid her abashment behind a veil of slow moving clouds. She had self-esteem issues, a result of her ruddy complexion and yo-yoing weight.

“Hello.” She peeped, hidden behind the gauze of condensed air moisture. Still, the embarrassed glow of her face hedged the fringes of the clouds, painting them a timid custard haze. The pair fell into an awkward silence, as they always did when words failed between them. Cowboy quickly changed course, turning towards Adam.

“You ready for this, buckaroo?” He asked.

“I don’t think so.” Adam replied.

“Well, you just do your best and things’ll fall into place. Usually do.” The whiskey in Cowboy’s blood lent backbone to his air of rugged confidence.

“You’re a good kid. Ain’t nothin’ bad gonna happen to you.” He said, nodding with a wobbly reassurance.

“I hope not.” Adam said. He couldn’t help but feel that the matter of his life and death was completely out of his hands. That sort of thing was decided by men far away, men with far more stake in what Adam was doing than Adam himself.

“Blue!” A voice belonging to Sergeant First Class Ulysses S. Alcott bellowed. “Pick it up! We’re leaving!”

Adam scrambled to gather his gear. His unit wouldn’t be going anywhere for hours, and everyone knew it. Everyone that is, except Sergeant Alcott, whose complete faith in the Army had filled him with the delusion that somewhere there was someone who knew what the hell was going on. There wasn’t.

Across the sea of bobbing heads, through the mire of dusty air, Adam could see his friend Peter Potter at the edge of the crowd standing by the battered plastic shit shack. Jane was at his side. They watched with disdain for a moment as Alcott mustered the troops into formation, then with the utmost discretion they absconded to fill their bellies. Adam was left hungry.

LNHFCOJ Update and Excerpt: Peter Potter Takes a Leak Again

2008-12-17T14:32:00.004-05:00

I posted the first half of this chapter before, I went back to rework it and ended up polishing it a bit more, I did a lot of fiddling with the second half of the chapter. This chapter takes place at the scene of Mack's helicopter crash about a day after the fact. It's not one of my favorite chapters because it's mostly functional in the sense that it's meant to introduce Fritter and Adam's other platoon members and expand a bit on their personalities. I wanted to share this chapter in its entirety since I'd already shown part of it before. So once again, Peter Potter Tak

Chapter 6

Evening, Day 13: Peter Potter Takes a Leak

Cowboy stood squarely with his rugged jeans and tall brown boots, beaming down on the wreckage. The ravaged palm grove stood nestled about his ankles. Soldiers scuttled through battered tree trunks and fallen fronds, diligently scouring the wreckage of the downed black hawk.

The polished brass of his Texas-sized belt buckle glimmered in the fading touch of daylight. He offered a brisk tip of his hat to the receding sun on the western horizon.

"Evenin' Miss," he said. With a faint quirk at the corner of his lips, he greeted the faint red star to his left.

"You’re lookin' mighty fine tonight. Mighty fine." His mellow western charm coated the sky a placid salmon hue, which quickly purpled, and fell into the dark bluish gray tint of early evening. The moon shied away, hiding the pain of going unnoticed by her rustic companion.

“Howdy Adam,” Cowboy said, peeling his sweat stained hat from the crown of his head. His mottled gray hair clung to the sides of his face. He placed his hat over his heart reverently. “see y’all are still pokin’ ‘round here. Any luck findin’ him?”

Adam pressed his shoulder against the side of his platoon’s lead vehicle, and with his left hand he yanked the door latch upwards. The smell of stale air tinted with gun lubricants evacuated the interior of the Humvee. Adam moved the starter switch a single click to the right, and then pushed it all the way, electing not to acknowledge the recommended wait time prescribed in the maintenance manual. The engine cranked and turned, rumbling with the roaring hunger of a diesel fed dragon. Adam clicked on the headlights, illuminating the bent helicopter and the fluttering tips of the Union Jack that had intertwined with the rotor mechanisms atop the felled aircraft.

Adam shook his head.

“Nope. Not yet. It’s not looking good.” He said, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. His eyes shot to the rippling waterway, scanning the illuminated areas for the slimy eyes, slippery tails and spiny fins of sea monsters. He didn’t see them.

“Even if he survived the crash, there’s no way he could have escaped the serpents.” Adam said, reaching blindly for the plastic lighter in his other pocket.

Adam was grimy from his chest to the toes of his boots with milk chocolate muck. Sweat ran in rivulets down his body, creeping through the fabric of his uniform and ballistic vest to mix with the waste from the irrigation ditches he had been skulking through. The river rose ominously before him in the fading glow of day, brown slowly fading to black as night’s grip tightened on the recovery site.

“Reckon not.” Cowboy acknowledged, the hope in his face deflated, making the ruddy contours of his face seem flat and pale. He tucked a clump of chew in his mouth and began to work at it.

“You need to turn the truck this way, Blue.” Specialist Peter Potter yelled from the fringe of the palm grove. Adam ignored him as he plucked a cigarette from the soggy hard pack. He dragged his thumb over the roller of the lighter, sparking a flame. He brought the burning lick of fire to the tip of the cigarette mashed between his lips. He shot out the first mouthful of fumes, ejecting smoke and spent lighter fluid. Then he drew inward, Adam filled himself with smoke as he rested his side against the steel plate bolted to the door of the truck.

Peter Potter ambled with a practiced nonchalance towards Adam. He held his fore and middle fingers to his lips, using body language to confer his desire to smoke one of Adam’s cigarettes. Peter’s liberal upbringing had taught him to have a sense of entitlement to things which inherently belonged to others. The warmth of Adam’s heart had taught him to give things, which were inherently his, to those in need. In that regard, Adam and Peter got along swimmingly.

Adam tossed the filthy pack of Camels to Peter.

Peter pilfered a single length of tobacco, filter and paper. He brought it to his lips and struck his lighter to life. He took a long drag, closing his eyes behind the fashionable frames of his designer glasses. Peter handed the pack back to Adam as he stepped closer.

“Can we get the lights over there? We need to be able to see where we’re wasting our time.” The conspiracy in Peter’s voice indicated that his vocalization of dissatisfaction was meant only to fill the short space between his face and Adam’s. Peter relished his secret rebellions, the moments he crafted for them were deeply satisfying expressions of his angst and generally characterized by whines thinly disguised with notes of sarcasm. Peter’s rampant disinterest in the mission was fueled by a life long and passionate apathy towards goal oriented activities. Peter was the product of a changing America. The country had become, over time, a place where those who could, often chose not to do. A place where those who wish they could, but couldn’t, believed they could anyway. The American dream had come to foster an environment where the stupid and talentless aspired to greatness, and the facile minority aspired to nothing more than a buzzing social commentary rooted in snobbish criticism. Peter was a lazy intellectual, with a haughty bone to pick with the institution that paid his bills. The government of the United States and every brain-dead soul that worked for it were in the cross-hairs of Peter’s jibes. He also had larger and less immediate issues with God. God didn’t seem to care.

“Fuck it.” Adam said, trying to sound casual. He had bigger worries than the bellies of the muddy irrigation ditches. The bellies he was worried about had eyes, fangs and scales wrapped around them. For the sake of everyone, Adam would suffer his comrades to fumble in the dark while he kept watch against the unseen evils of the river Tigris.

“Yeah, fuck it. I think we’re getting out of here soon, anyway.” Peter replied, shooting a jet of smoke from his nostrils. “This is bullshit, they had crew out here a half-hour after the crash and they didn’t find a damn thing. They wait twelve hours, bring us out and have us spend the whole day combing wreckage? What the fuck is that? Retarded.”

“Fucking retarded.” Adam agreed half-heartedly.

“Damn ol’ ungracious little pistol startin’ polecat.” Cowboy spat. “Got no respect for the goodness of folks. I’m half a hair off trackin’ down his pa and settin’ him straight for the wrongness he done raisin’ that boy. I’d set him straight by bustin’ his ribs, for one.”

The moon plugged her ears and held her breath. Foul language and violence had a way of taking a toll on her, and she wanted nothing to do with any of it. She watched Cowboy shadowbox the sprawling emptiness of space, cussing and spitting Peter’s parentage. His spurs spun brightly as he stomped and growled. The moon waxed bright red as her cheeks bulged into the night. When he reached for his flask, she knew it was safe to surrender her guard, so she did.

Cowboy tipped whiskey into his mouth, gulping twice before relaxing the bottle. He wiped his mustache clean with the sleeve of his checked shirt, and turned his ornery eyes on Peter who, for his part, was still being a prick.

“I mean, who the hell cares?” Peter asked. He brushed the smoldering end of the cigarette against the side of the humvee, leaving an ashen streak across the armor. Peter cupped his mouth in his hand and pulled it down across his chin, his fingers dragging the sweaty sheen that had gathered around his lips away from his face.

“I’m gonna go piss.”

Peter walked off. He trucked down the river bank towards a stand of reeds outside of the prying eyes of the humvee headlights. His M4 assault rifle bounced against his legs as it waggled in its sling.

“If I’m not back in ten minutes… widen the search area.”

“I hope them critters get him.” Cowboy said, his lips working effortlessly around the mouth of his flask. “Serve him right.”

“What a horrible thing to say, Cowboy.” The moon admonished.

“Serve him right all the same.” Cowboy snapped, knowing even as he said it, that it wasn’t true. No one deserved the cruel fate that befell anyone unfortunate enough to be eaten by sea monsters.

“Hey guys! Bring it in!” Lieutenant Oliver Brenard called from the bank of the river. He turned his head to whisper into the handheld radio clasped to his vest. He started his walk up the path of light leading to the humvee.

“Come on! Hurry the fuck up, people!”

Soldiers from the company emerged from the palm grove, their gear dangling like Christmas ornaments from steel rings attached to their vests. Their faces were hollow with exhaustion as they formed a circle around the Lieutenant.

“Alcott, make sure we got everybody. We’re rolling out. They’re bringing in a crane or something to pull that chopper out of the water. They want the area clear.”

Sergeant Alcott shifted uneasily in his boots, as his ham fingers counted off the soldiers in his platoon.

“We’re missing one.” He said.

“Damn it, who? Think quick.” Oliver demanded, purposely not giving Alcott time to think.

Alcott cringed, scratching at his armpits. His face contorted, causing his eyes to bulge more than usual behind his chunky plastic goggles.

“Think quicker, you fucking moron.” Oliver said. He was young and in charge, and being of sound competence, he had the liberty of taking no pity on Sergeant Alcott’s struggles with the trappings of leadership.

“Adam, help him.” The moon begged.

Adam’s fingers tangled in the sling of his gun, wrestling with the all too intimate burden of his knowledge of Peter Potter’s bladder functions. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, Peter tumbled out of the reeds. He was awkwardly shoving buttons through eye-holes to conceal his freshly drained crotch.

Alcott, having been rescued by circumstances, found his confidence.

“Potter, get over here!” He bellowed. “You trying to get yourself killed? Go ahead, wander off. See how long it takes you to walk into some shit. See how long it takes Al Qaeda to saw your fucking head off. I’ve got something for you when we get back to the FOB.”

“It better be a fucking medal, Sergeant. ‘Cuz I’ve got something for you right now.” Peter said, a smug grin running the width between his dimpled cheeks. He held something between his thumb and forefinger, a sparkling something.

“What? Medal? Shitbags don’t get medals.” Alcott replied, forgetting that he himself had been awarded several medals.

“I don’t really want a medal you dipshit. Look at this.”

“Potter, watch it... that dipshit you’re talking to is a Sergeant First Class.” Oliver mumbled.

“Goddamned right I am.” Alcott said, puffing his chest ineffectually within his armor.

Peter glanced at Oliver, who glanced back at Peter, then they both looked to Alcott. Together, they shared a mutual sense of resignation: the Army was broken, and Alcott was material proof of a failing system. Peter held up his prize, shining in the headlamps, a glittering nugget.

“Shutup, dipshit.” Oliver turned back to Peter. “What’ve you got?”

“It’s a tooth, a gold capped tooth.”

“So?” Alcott’s face jerked involuntarily, having been none too subtly exposed as an incompetent, he struggled to lift himself back into a position of authority.

“It’s Colonel Carrington’s tooth.”

“So?”

“I found it over there, on some rocks.” Peter said, pointing to the reeds.

“The helicopter is over there.” Peter pointed in the opposite direction.

“So?”

“Fucking, Christ.” Oliver could take no more. “It means he probably isn’t dead. It means he could’ve walked away.”

Hope filled Adam’s heart.

“He did not leave the crash. He was spirited away.” A voice said, slithering into the circle. “He is likely… dead.”

Lieutenant Colonel Fritter stalked towards the soldiers, his dark eyes dreaming reasons for Mack Carrington to be dead. His heart pumped for control, for mastery over the apparatus of military might just within his reach. He put a hand on Adam’s shoulder, and leaned close to his ear. His bifurcated tongue lashed loudly next to Adam’s face, splitting the atmosphere with the duplicitous lies of terrifying and false revelations.

“It is evident, that the terrorists who shot down our Colonel have collected him as a trophy of their ill deeds. They are not ignorant of our rank structure. They saw the bird fixed upon his chest, and they stole him away. Colonel Ramirez was submerged, thus obfuscating his rank, which is why he was left behind,” to swell and pop and fester. “So while, indeed, Colonel Carrington may have made it over to yonder rocks, there is little evidence he did so of his own accord. He is,” rotting meat, “somewhere out there in that devil waste and it is our charge to find him. We shall not slack in our duty to return him,” in a box, “to those he loves,” picked clean to the bone by the wild scavengers, ”and the terrorists. What of them? We shall hunt them so long as,” it is required to maintain the air of concern and dignity,” hope exists.” Hope does not exist. “We shall search for him, as we do for all those brave souls gone missing in action.” The search will be in vain, “We shall be a,” false, “ray of hope for his wife and family,” thinking of his wailing widow, the tear dappled faces of his orphans, “in the bleak times to come. Your tenacious optimism is a credit to your high spirits,” but is grossly misplaced. “we will gather that strength and,” bend it to my villainous ends, forgetting all Mack Carrington taught you, “for good, we will endeavor to,” destroy, “a legacy of mercy and justice and,” under the auspices of, “heroism, we shall encourage the establishment of things which might be called sacred,” in the wickedest way it can be said, ”this is our charge. We bear this burden for Colonel Mack Carrington” and we curse, “his love of country, his pride in fairness and his mentorship.”

Colonel Fritter’s malevolent voice betrayed the delight he took in smashing the hopes of others. When his mouth closed, his fangs still shone brightly between his parted lips, a reminder of the work his maw was meant to do: tear things apart. The circle was silent, helmeted heads, like tombstones, stood still in the warm fetid breeze rising off the Tigris.

“Don’t believe them lies, Adam. He wants you dead inside, he wants you dead inside so he pull your insides out and look’em over. That sonofabitch is a schemer and schemers ain’t nothin’ if you’re somethin’.” Cowboy said, his hand sliding dangerously close to the ivory handle of the six-shooter strapped to his hip.

“Mount up.” Oliver saluted Fritter quickly, and his hand springing for the latch of the passenger door.

“Be safe.” Fritter looked hungrily at Adam Blue’s still hopeful eyes. “Let’s not have another accident.”

“Roger, sir.” Oliver said, hastening into his position in the humvee.

Adam scaled the hood, splitting his attention between getting into the gun turret, watching for the lurking serpents in the river and the pearly blades infesting Colonel Fritter’s mouth. He jumped into his fighting position, pulled on his gloves and checked the machine gun. Lastly, he velcroed his headset on. He was wired into the machine.

Jane’s voice came through the earpieces.

“Everyone good? Blue, you good up there?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” Adam replied. He lit a cigarette as the humvee jumped forward.

“You’re the best Adam. You really are. We love you.” The moon said.

“Ah shucks, don’t go mistin’ the feller up with your female sensitivities. He needs to be concentratin’ on makin’ war and all.” Cowboy projected manliness across the great black chasm of the cosmos. His testosterone filled words flew freely in the wide reaches of space, bouncing against the effeminate twinkles of far away stars. More delicate celestial bodies pursed their lips and pouted indignantly at the thought of forbidding exclamations of love. Stars of all sorts were a generally romantic bunch, and most cringed at the thought that love of any sort might go unexpressed. Their sentimentality had risen from untold generations of lovelorn humans looking to them for hope.

---

Across the countryside, on craggy roads, the convoy bumped and rattled. The city lights grew in the distance; sparse beads of golden light grew larger and whiter as the trucks rocketed toward them. First, the shanty town outskirts: sagging mud homes with rippled sheet-metal roofs, and chicken wire windows. Then there were the proper muhallas, proud neighborhoods with mosque minarets emerging up from the sea of flat-topped structures. The buildings were built of crumbling concrete and warped rails. Low electrical wiring dipped over muddy streets and alleyways. Small communities were separated by fields of garbage. The sweet stink of rotting waste wafted over low rooftops and cloth awnings. Arabic signs advertised mobile phone services, and warned parents of the dangers of letting children play with explosives. The city yawned in the night, engulfing the trucks.

The flickering bars of fluorescent lights on the sides of the buildings lining Route Werewolf made the whole world seem desperate and clingy. The flash of the bulbs blasted into the gun-barrel darkness, igniting the gaps between the tightly packed hovels. Adam’s eyes shot in and out of the lit spaces, windows and thin corridors. Iraqi men and Iraqi women made lives in front of him, and he snatched precious glimpses into their alien worlds.

Crouching in his turret, Adam was ready to react to, aim at, and gun down the enemy. The enemy had no name. Sometimes the people Adam worked with called the enemy Al Qaeda, or Jaysh Al-Islam, or Taweed Al-Jihad. No one was really sure who was who, people just looked like people to Adam. People looked unhappy. What Adam didn’t know is that people were the enemy, and at that very moment the enemy had plans. The enemy planned to say goodnight to its mother, smoke a cigarette and go to bed. It was 2300, by military account, and well past the bed time of the meat and potatoes of the insurgency. Young adults, Adam's age and younger, conspired to tuck themselves into warm beds and get cozy. They plotted their surrenders to heavy eyelids. They were all tuckered out from a long day of insurging... for some, visions of virgins danced in their heads. Others slept, but did not dream. Still, there were even more that would relive the nightmares of their lives, the horrible deaths of loved ones and adversaries alike. Adam was wide awake, peering up at the sky through his foggy goggles. He couldn't see to save his life.

The 240-Bravo machinegun rattled and spun in the steel mount trying to break free of the cotter pin, the slender length of metal that kept death safely pointed in the right direction. Adam slammed a green glove into the top of the pin pounding it back into place, averting a small disaster. Adam wondered who, in the absence of Colonel Carrington, would keep death pointed in the right direction.

“Nice helmet, you son of a turtle fucker.” A voice shouted from behind the muddy cloud of Adam's goggles. Adam reached a finger past his cheek and wiped the moisture off of his protective glasses. The starry night burst forth, and the shit talking star was exposed, a dishwater gray pinprick sullying the orchestrated grandeur of existence.

“You look like your mother fucked a turtle!”

There are over ten thousand stars visible to the human eye,

“You hear me? Your mother fucked turtle! Your stupid helmet on your stupid head looks like a turtle shell, you get that?”

"Now hold up a galldarn second there you rascal! The kid’s got a job to do and I'll be hornswaggled if I’m gonna let you get these folks killed with your bullshittin’.” Cowboy drew down on the rascal star. “Don't you reckon now’s a time to shut your galldarn mouth?" Cowboy said, tipping his imaginary hat back and waiting for his good old fashioned commonsense to take hold. He spat a wad of chewing tobacco into a black hole.

"Well don't you reckon, you sonofabitch?"

The rascal star had grown quiet, Adam could tell that he was actually reckoning at that very moment. It sounded like a power steering problem, and then the engine died. The truck coasted to the side of the road, and then over the curb and into a shallow ditch.

"Fucking cunt, piece of shit truck, fuck!" Jane’s voice ripped open the intercom.

"Fuck!" She yelped, trying to emphasize to no one in particular just how very pissed off she was.

"That gal’s meaner than a man-eatin’ Injun." Cowboy marveled aloud.

“Oh that’s not so, and you, you know that’s not true. Native Americans aren’t cannibals. That’s racist.” Said the moon, softly interjecting.

“I swear I seen’em do it with my own two eyes, darlin’. I swear it, sure as Sunday, them Injuns were dancin’ around a cook fire what had some poor bastard on the spit.” Said Cowboy. His voice was filled with truth, but his memory was sopping wet with booze. He’d seen nothing of the sort.

“Fuck this!” Jane hopped out of the truck into the ankle deep muck. The slick puddles of black water absorbed her weight and she kicked and splashed and sploshed and swore. The other two trucks in the convoy pulled into defensive positions, the other gunners spinning their turrets to create a fan of protective coverage. Weary soldier extracted themselves from the armored safety of their trucks to augment the hasty perimeter. They kneeled in the dark, rifles at the ready.

Jane stomped and raged, splashing mud as she lifted the hood of the truck. Adam grinned, as she fumed in smoldering acridness rising from the engine.

“What the fuck are you smiling about Blue? You think it’s funny? Our fucking engine dies in the middle of fucking Baghdad and you want to have a fucking laugh? Is Potter down there tickling your goddamned balls or something?”

“No, he’s not.”

Jane growled inarticulately, curling her nose up into her skull as best she could to escape the combined stench of sewage and burnt oil.

Adam peered over the top of the turret at Jane.

“Hey, Sergeant…”

“What Blue? What the fuck?”

“You’ve got shit on your face.”

“I’m in a big fucking muddy ditch, Blue. We’re moving from one muddy fucking ditch to another. That’s all this fucking place is, a bunch of muddy fucking ditches and we’re just jumping in and out of them. Fuck this place.”

“Yeah, but that’s not mud.”

The one lesson that every soldier in Baghdad learned was that mud was never mud. Jane had forgotten.

“Fuck these cocksucking ragheads.” Jane dragged her sleeve across her cheek, smearing the greasy sewage across her face and arm.

“Now, there, that there’s somethin’ racist for you. Injuns is Injuns… but raghead? That’s just hateful. Arabs invented science and such.” Cowboy sucked at his whiskey, polishing off the bottle.

The moon shrugged helplessly. She was not in the habit of distinguishing between schools of bigotry.

“Apples and apples,” whispered the moon, “apples and apples.”

‘Raghead’ is what some of the people Adam worked with called Arabs. In fairness, the Arabs called the people Adam worked with some pretty awful things too. Mutual animosity flew wildly on either side of the language barrier. The understanding of misunderstanding prolonged the conflict but also kept its participants from fully understanding the depth of each other’s contempt, in that regard, it was useful in keeping heads from getting blown off.

Adam dug into his pocket. He pulled out his Camels, and stole a glance at the gutted carcass of cardboard and foil. Three cigarettes floated aimlessly inside. Adam liked cigarettes because they didn't make plans. They weren't going to college. They weren't going into the work force to do a job at a fair wage. They were tumbling towards oblivion, and Adam was happy to have them along for the ride.

Adam lit a cigarette. It tasted like mud, which is to say, it tasted like shit.

Fallout 3 - A Reflection On the Writing

2008-12-08T15:26:00.002-05:00

“Closure, then, may be regarded as a modification of structure that makes stasis, or the absence of further continuation or, put another way, it creates in the reader the expectation of nothing” –Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Pg. 34

We are not dogs. We do not eat kibble. We do not truckle cozily at slippered feet. Yet, the designers of Fallout 3 have created for its audience a vast interactive game of fetch. Retrieval and delivery style events in video games are a widely adopted design convention hailing back to the earliest computerized game artifacts. They are a staple of the video game designer’s repertoire and are especially vital to single player gaming. In most single player experiences the player is pitted against obstacles in a virtual environment in order to achieve a stated goal. Additionally, the acts of going and doing are key facets in maintaining a sense of interactivity within the game environment where even basic tasks need to have an air of importance or at the very least conceal their mundane nature. The use of the delivery and retrieval quest models within Fallout 3 is a direct response to technical and functional consideration of game development and game play; the text within the game is used primarily to camouflage functional structures of the design, complicate play and to compel the player to complete tasks that advance the game to conclusion; in this regard, storytelling elements typically become a tertiary reflection for the designers.

Most games, including traditionally analog card and board games, include a delivery and retrieval aspect. In chess, a player drives pieces from one end of a board to another in order to trap or capture the opponent’s king. In poker, participants retrieve a series of random cards from the dealer and the player with the best combination of cards wins. Chess consists of a single delivery element: coordinating the movement of pieces to threaten the enemy king; the simplicity of the game is made more appealing by the complexity of strategies involved in placing the opponent in checkmate. In poker, the fetching element involves the retrieval of cards from the deck; play is structured around participants delivering valued tokens, or chips, into a betting pool and providing strategic obstacles for other players with the ultimate goal being to return a winning hand of cards to the deck and retrieve as many chips as possible. In both games, elements of play complicate and conceal rudimentary structural elements. In Fallout 3, character dialogs and supplementary texts serve a similar function: distracting the player from objectives determined by game play and design requirements. Most quests in Fallout 3 consist either of the player traveling to a location (thus delivering the player), or retrieving an object from a location. Both quest types are justified in a variety of ways related to the discovery of in-game landmarks and key non-player characters. The player is given explorative goals through information gleaned from conversations with non-player characters who serve as quest hubs. In this regard, the content of conversations is irrelevant provided it achieves the effect of informing the player of requirements and compelling the player in some way to desire the completion of quests.

In the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout 3, the player follows his or her father out of the safety of a massive underground bomb-shelter community known as Vault 101, and emerges in the rubble and wastes of an annihilated Washington D.C.. The irradiated Capital Wastelands are populated by human survivors and a variety of mutants, as well as two military organizations with conflicting goals regarding the fate of the local population. The initial sequences of the game occur within the Vault where the player is educated about Vault life and compelled to perform basic tasks. One of these moments involves the player receiving an air-pump pellet rifle from the father character and his or her education in the use of the weapon. The veneer of the father-child relationship is meant to conceal the fact that game designers are providing instruction to the player in the mechanical elements of game play. Additionally, the writing establishes the importance of this relationship with the intent of quickly resonating with an audience intimately familiar with the commonplace of the father-child dynamic. The convention of establishing familial bonds between the player and non-player characters is found commonly in games containing storytelling elements and helps to create a sense of immersion within the interactive environment in the hopes of assuring player interest in completing the mechanical objectives later introduced in the game. In this regard, the guideposts that Bazerman describes serve not just to facilitate meaningful communication between the writer and reader, but rather to translate functional design requirements into a language or mindset that is compelling or familiar to the player.

One must also consider the investments made by the design studio in terms time and treasure. In the non-linear sandbox style environment of Fallout 3 it is easy for players to become lost or distracted while weaving between delivery and retrieval quests, locations, and quest or information hubs. In approaching the design of a game environment in which not all content will be explored by all players, the designers are forced to prioritize the investment of their time and resources and allocate the greatest commitment to those assets in the game which will be encountered by the greatest number of players. With this in mind, designers craft a main quest that players are forced to follow in order to advance the game to conclusion. The main quest yields the greatest return on the designer’s investment and is typically the best wrought portion of the game, showcasing the most significant aesthetic and narrative achievements. One of the immersive qualities of the game centers on in-game music that is delivered via radio to the character; Galaxy News Radio provides music and also main quest updates to the player in a long loop of audio. The radio functions as a sort alarm clock for the main plot reminding the player of what has already occurred, and prompting the player to remember his or her commitment to pursuing the game objectives in which the investment was placed. This is additionally, and probably better, evidenced in Fallout 3 by the employment of two prominent voice talents used exclusively in the main quest: Ron Perlman and Liam Neeson. Perlman narrates the prologue and epilogue of the game, as he has in the previous Fallout titles, voicing the overarching moral of the series: “War never changes.” Liam Neeson voices the player’s father, the object of pursuit in the early stages of game play, and later, a quest and information hub. The substantial financial commitment of hiring prominent voice talent means that talent has to be utilized in the most effective way possible, exposing as much of the content as possible to as many players as possible. In some cases, the game even breaks from its immersive player free agency and forces the player to stand still while Neeson’s character speaks, the player has no free agency during Perlman’s narratives. This removal of freedom performs two functions: it ensures that the most costly voice acting is received by the audience, and it reaffirms the importance of story elements meant to maintain player connection with the underlying game structure. The main quest can be seen not as an unraveling story, but rather a mechanical design in which the player retrieves audio snippets of Liam Neeson’s voice inside of the larger task of retrieving Ron Perlman’s vocal contributions. In this sense, the writing performs not just as a system of guideposts to translate the mechanics of the game design, but also illustrates the development of writing conventions in response to design conventions arising from the need for designers to justify their investments.

The impression left by playing through Fallout 3 is that the writing lacked importance in the design process and was primarily reactive to that process in structure and style. It seems disingenuous considering that the marketing for the game is based on the uniqueness of its setting and the assumption that with that setting the player will be drawn into game propelled by its narrative as with previous Fallout titles. The first two installments of the series designed by Black Isle Studios were very writing centric, and the mechanics of design were largely built as a vessel around that writing. The third Fallout, designed by Bethesda Game Studios, abandons that philosophy and instead works to achieve mechanical efficiency by marrying the writing to design requirements. It is a common method in the game industry to design mechanics first and add story elements later and in that regard Bethesda adheres very tightly to established conventions, working within them to achieve guaranteed financial success with an artistically mediocre game (in terms of story). The legacy Fallout 3 inherits from earlier installments shows the effectiveness of breaking from design conventions in order to achieve an atypical result in the medium, in the case of Black Isle’s works: a compelling story experience inside of a game environment in which most other accepted design conventions remain intact. It was Black Isle’s ability to bend the rules of game design without breaking them that led to the artistic success and critical praise of their Fallout games. The achievements of the first two Fallout games were so significant that five years after the studio responsible for them closed its doors, ten years after the second installment and four years after the final spin-off from the intellectual property was published, the series still had enough credibility to warrant spawning another sequel. In the realm of video game design, that is as close as a game can come to being canonical in so far as Herrnstein-Smith attributes the quality to the endurance of a work. Fallout 3 as a storytelling vessel, on the other hand, does nothing to distinguish itself from established video game writing conventions; in fact, it does a poor job of hiding the architecture of its quest design and frequently fails at maintaining narrative consistency. The fact that there are at least two characters with strong foreign accents living in a populated American wasteland more than 200 years after nuclear holocaust seems improbable and violates the rules of the established setting. Additionally, within the main plot attached to the main quest the main villain actually dies halfway through the game in a cinematic sequence and then reappears later without any explanation of his resurrection, a fact that flatly breaks the flow of the narrative and illustrates the lack of commitment to telling a cohesive story on the part of the designers. At some point in Fallout 3’s design process, the most carefully fashioned portion of the game was left either unfinished or sloppily handled, a fact that does not speak to the care of the designers or their commitment to storytelling within the medium. The end of the game also occurs suddenly, the player is meant to choose the fate of the Capital Wastelands having located both a three-digit code to activate a massive water purification system and a poison to eradicate mutant life. At this point, the player has the choice of whether or not to use the poison and whether or not to enter the irradiated room where the console is located. In all the scenarios available, the game ends, Ron Perlman reads the epilogue and the player is deemed either a hero or a villain, and in most cases dead. The sudden and irreversible end of the game comes without warning.

The problem with Fallout 3 is that the work its writing does centers on getting the player to swallow the pill of design conventions without offering a spoonful of sugar in the form of good storytelling. In that respect, Fallout 3 has done a fine job of giving me, as the audience, a sense of poetic closure in that I expect absolutely nothing from its designers after having finished the game. I suppose that could be considered a measure of their storytelling success, if the story in question was that of the Fallout series.

Some Assembly Required: Technical Challenges to the Art of Video Game Design

2008-11-12T10:06:00.013-05:00

This is the first draft of a paper I wrote for my pop-culture writing class. It's also the first of a series of papers I'm planning to write on video game theory.

________________________________________________________________

In spite of several decades of rapid development in the quality and content of video games, the development community struggles to be considered seriously as an art form. The constant technological evolution of the video game industry has both helped and hindered the artistic maturation of game development. Advancements in graphics rendering, computer processing, and memory storage capacity have increased the artistic potential of the medium by providing designers with ever more powerful tools with which to create virtual environments. However, the rate at which new technologies are integrated into the design process effectively prevents the creation of recognizable masterpieces within the collection of published video games. Without canonical standards against which to judge the final works of designers it is difficult to establish a method for the consistent measure of artistic value within the medium.

The progression from the monochromatic, two-dimensional interactions of early games to the robust three-dimensional environments of modern games didn’t occur over night; however, when compared to the more lengthy history of better established art forms, the artistry of video game design is very much in its infancy. This is largely perceived as a lack of depth in the craft (or a lack of craft all together) when compared against concretely defined mediums. The relative youth of video game design and its capacity for imitating the functions of other media contributes to the somewhat tepid cultural reaction to the idea that video games can be art. Games often perform in a storytelling capacity similar to literature or film. However, because a video game is neither film nor literature its attempts to perform the same functions in an environment largely limited by technical capabilities rather than artistic vision seem profoundly lacking when compared to the canonical references of these other mediums. In spite of its vast quantity of text and deep story elements (when measured against other examples in the medium) the 2007 science fiction action-RPG Mass Effect pales in comparison to the literary incarnation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Both works are noted within their mediums for their relative length and depth, but when the question of their quality arises, Mass Effect is not seen in the same light as the more familiar incarnation of the science fiction epic. The developer Bioware considers itself the best video game writing company in the business, but when its writing stacks up against the flagship medium for the written form: the novel, its attempts at recreating the depth of a novelized fictional environment through the written word come off as unwieldy. Popular video game critic Ben Croshaw highlights this in his December 2007 review, “Mass Effect is like an incontinent who just drank six bottles of Mountain Dew, so full to bursting with dialog that it leaks out at every turn” (Crowshaw). Setting aside Croshaw’s snide phrasing, he makes a nod to a much deeper flaw in the current incarnation of video games: the inability of developers to replicate through imitation the successes of other mediums. In this case, Mass Effect achieves immense quantities of text through dialogs and world-fleshing information, but the execution comes off as encyclopedic and forced when compared to the lengthy dalliances of more matured mediums. The inability of Mass Effect to compete with similar genre examples in other mediums can be seen as a failure of the developers as artists, but it is more likely that the relative failure is inherent to the medium. Due to the newness of the technology, there are far fewer cultural examples of successful video game science fiction epics than there are literary ones; therefore, the developers of Mass Effect had a much weaker catalog of experience regarding what is and is not effective within the art form when compared to their book-bound counterparts.

Game designers thrive in a technologically stagnant environment. That is to say, software can only be developed if there is sufficient hardware capability to run the program. As a result, software development lags behind hardware development. The struggle of software designers to keep up with improvements in hardware capabilities is best evidenced in the game console market where the computing capacity only changes every five to seven years. During the life of a video game console, the quality of games increases as programmers come closer to reaching the maximum potential of the system. Historically speaking, the best examples of a console’s capabilities are generally seen at the end of its life cycle. The striking difference between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 is a result of game designers finding better and more efficient ways of pushing the Nintendo Entertainment System to its hardware limits. Over time, game programmers are able to identify and overcome problems, allowing them to refine both the technical and aesthetic conventions of console-based game design. In his essay Abstraction in the Video Game, video game theorist Mark J.P. Wolf describes an example of creative design used to circumnavigate restrictions imposed by early gaming hardware, “Memory and programming tricks helped game developers overcome limitations; for example, only four color-lum registers were available, meaning that a game character could only be one color. Some games, like Superman(1979) and E.T: The Extraterrestrial(1982) got around this by changing the color luminosity values on a line-by-line basis, which allowed characters to be multiple colors, although any given horizontal line of pixels had to be the same color; a stylistic limitation due to the way the monitor scans the image on the screen. Graphics complexity, then, was often a sign of programming prowess and graphics evolved as programmers tried to outdo each other”(Wolf, 56). This anecdotal account of software innovation demonstrates how the human element of design can achieve a level of artistry not inherently made obvious by the stated capabilities of the gaming platform. Video game consoles are important to the game industry because they provide a brief period of hardware stagnation which allows for artistic stability; the resourcefulness of designers trying to surpass the artistic boundaries set by hardware limitations promotes programming efficiency and imagination in the design process.

The availability of gaming hardware can also limit the level of artistic expression in the medium. If video games were limited to personal computers the design market would likely be much more volatile given the disparity between the processing powers of machines available to potential players on the market. A chief complaint amongst prospective purchasers of computer games is the variation of system requirements. A company designing a video game for the computer is compelled to make the best possible game with available technology; unfortunately, the technology available to a video game developer is typically more advanced than the technology available to the average gamer. Tim Holman, a senior producer for Relic Entertainment, defined the obvious problems with designing software for a non-existent hardware community in an interview with the online magazine Edge. “If you make a game with such high-end requirements that only people with a $6,000 PC can play it at a decent framerate, of course your sales are going to drop” (Graft). The effect of audience accessibility can create artificial limitations in the design process resulting in a product which is artistically inferior to what the designer is capable of producing. In this regard, traditional video game consoles perform another important function: ensuring technological compatibility between those producing video games and those playing them. The negative to guaranteed hardware and software compatibility is that more powerful software cannot be introduced until the end of a console life cycle. So the industry is often forced to choose between security of product compatibility and technological innovation when choosing a platform on which to release a game. Additionally, the added time of adapting a game to multiple platforms can cause delays which, when anticipated decrease the amount of time devoted to content generation, and when unanticipated, can cause a game release to be postponed. Essentially, the adage about the tree falling in the woods is very relevant to the video game industry, since a game cannot be successful within the medium if there are no players capable or willing to play it and thus able to appreciate its artistry. In this regard, the designer’s choice of specific hardware or software can have a direct impact on how the game is received critically and by the general public, or whether it is received at all.

The combination of rapid technological advancement and the limitations imposed by existing hardware capabilities compounds the difficulties of creating art within the virtual environment of the video game. Whether it is a lack of effective design conventions to respond to technical limitations or to meaningfully communicate the artistic vision of the designer, the video game as a medium is not devoid of artistic potential. Two unaffiliated game designers provide remarkably similar answers to the question of whether video games can be considered art. Montgomery Markland, a professional video game designer with Obsidian Entertainment, responded: “The fact that developers can choose to ignore the artistic possibilities of the medium does not impute an impossibility of artistry to the video game any more than the fact that a painter can choose to paint a house rather than a canvas. Video games are art when designed to be art, as is true of any other form of human expression” (Markland). The debate over whether the artistic elements of a video game are a response to a utilitarian need for entertainment or an artistic expression by virtue of the fact that artistic decisions are made in their production is further explored by Jonathan Blow, an independent game designer; in an interview with Game Informer Magazine he likened the creative decisions made during the process of designing a laptop to the creative process of designing a game marketed solely for its ability to respond to functional exigencies (Blow). In both cases, the implication is that the burden of proving the artfulness of a particular game resides in the intentions and capabilities of its creators. Likewise, neither designer discounts the production of games within the medium which do not constitute artful expression. This speaks to flexibility of the medium in so far that it is understood that the advancement of technology provides tools capable of accomplishing a variety of goals for a multitude of designers with differing philosophies and agendas. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge genre within the landscape of game design so as to recognize the impetus for the use of technology in the creation of specific digital environments.

With the acceptance that video game design is new relative to other forms of art and the strong influence wielded by a developer’s intentions towards the nature of the final product; one is left to consider the actual nuts and bolts of game design and how these factor into the realization of an artistic vision in an accelerated technological arena. As previously stated, the life of a successful video game console is a fairly brief window of time, and the life of relevant personal computer hardware can be even more fleeting. As a result, game developers are forced to complete their works inside of a short timeframe, mastering skills and applying whatever conventions they have at their disposal towards a final product release. The act of fully realizing a digital world piece by piece is no small task, and as the computing elements surrounding that task grow to accommodate greater amounts of environmental nuance more development time is required to generate the aesthetic elements. Even in many of the most communally lauded games this results in a shifting of design focus towards the production of more polished surface elements in order to maintain the veneer of technical relevance. While increased emphasis on visual art assets does not preclude a game from becoming art; the purpose of those artistic decisions can easily slide from the creative to the utilitarian and can also have detrimental effects on other elements of design as more time and resources are devoted to them. One of the quirks of video game design is that increasing the scope of any one aspect of design can seem simple while exponentially compound the workload associated with another aspect. Within the video game design community this is commonly referred to as “feature creep”; as more ideas and assets are integrated into the game, the focus of the project shifts from accomplishing the original stated goals to accommodating technical or artistic additions. “Feature creep is partly a result of the somewhat evolutionary process of videogame development, and partly a result of the constructivist nature of the product, in which technological features and content can be easily added during the course of development” (Tschang, 123). The expansion of a virtual environment immediately demands that the environment be populated with visual art assets, scripted events, and in many cases non-player character driven dialog. A developer can approach the consistent population of this expanded space within the timeframe of the project in one of two ways: either by reassigning time and resources devoted to the deepening of existing assets, or by increasing the size of the development team to handle the additional workload. Both options have the end result of diminishing the potential artistic depth of a game through diffusion of development resources or the delegation of carrying out an artistic vision to a greater number of people. As technological expectations swell in the video game industry, the paradigm of the auteur developer withers for the sake of a more practical and democratic design philosophy.

Due to technical advancements some design conventions become obsolete, either as a result of changing capabilities or changing user and industry expectations. The shifting morphology of design challenges the formation of assumptions about how games should be made. “In spite of the complexity of game artifacts and player experience, much of the design activity at game companies has traditionally been conducted as an intuitive process” (Knez, Niedenthal). Without a widely held understanding or presumption of how games should be made, the realization and establishment of useful canonical references within the medium becomes difficult. An art community existing in a canonical vacuum suffers from a lack of reference points around which to form sound design philosophies and critical opinions. This can encourage innovation by eliminating dogmatic approaches to design issues; it can also stifle innovation by forcing developers to imitate financial success in lieu of advancing or pioneering potentially superior, but unproven techniques. Until such a point that video game technology plateaus, the architecture of video game design will remain in flux and at the mercy of technical considerations. Artistry, in many cases, will remain a secondary consideration in the design process. The medium of video games is not broken per se, but some additional assembly may be required before it is culturally embraced as an avenue of artistic expression.

Works Cited

Croshaw, Ben, “Zero Punctuation: Mass Effect” The Escapist, Web. 19 Dec. 2007, 10 Nov. 2008.http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/18-Mass-Effect" .

Wolf, Mark J.P., and Perron, Bernard, eds. The Video Game Theory Reader Florington, KY.: Routledge, 2003

Graft, Kris, “PC Devs “Shoot Themselves In the Foot”” Edge, Web. 6 Nov. 2008, 10 Nov. 2008..http://www.edge-online.com/news/pc-devs-shoot-themselves-in-foot

Markland, Montgomery. “Re: Video Games as Art Statement” E-mail to the author. 27 Oct. 2008.

Blow, Jonathon, “The Vanguard” Game Informer Nov. 2008: 42-44

Tschang, F. Ted “Videogames as Interactive Experiential Products and Their Manner of Development” International Journal of Innovation Management 9.1 (2005)

Knez, Igor, and Niedenthal, Simon, “Lighting in Digital Game Worlds: Effects on Affect and Play Performance” CyberPsychology and Behavior 11.2 (2008)

Life in the Valley: Michael Jackson, King of the Undead

2008-10-21T18:57:00.005-04:00

Since his 1964 debut as a member of the family R&B act The Jackson Five, Michael Jackson has established himself as a fixture in international popular culture. His solo career, opening with a major success in 1979’s Off the Wall album, has spanned nearly thirty years of music. His fame reached its height from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, during which time he was a significant musical, cultural and economic force. The intensity of his media exposure through tabloid press has, over the last fifteen years, transformed Jackson into a public spectacle. The combination of Michael Jackson’s progressively anti-social behavior, legal problems, obvious eccentricities and hyper-real elements inherent to the genre of tabloid magazines has effectively transformed him into something less than human, an object. This objectification has made it publically permissible to treat him as less than human, stripping him of privacy, consideration, and respect typically seen as inherently deserved by all people. Michael Jackson serves as an excellent example of the dehumanization of celebrities by tabloid magazines given the height of his success and the level of criticism and public scrutiny he has been subjected to over the years.

In the early 1970s a theory was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to explain why, in many cases, as a robot becomes more human-like in appearance or quality the human reaction to the robot becomes more positive, until such a point that a robot becomes unsettlingly inhuman where positive reaction suddenly drops off and becomes negative until such a point that the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human. When given numeric value, and charted on a graph, that representative space where human similarity is most resented, and given to negative response is called the uncanny valley. (MacDorman, Minato) The idea of the uncanny valley has been adopted beyond the field of robotics to explain human attachment or aversion to artificial representations of human beings in a virtual environment. Viewed broadly in the context of the hyper-real virtual environment of tabloid magazines it is possible to draw a correlation between the commoditization and objectification of celebrities and the public acceptance of their mistreatment, exploitation and ridicule when examined as a real world manifestation of the uncanny valley.

In a hyper-real environment in which images or symbols achieve a level of importance or cultural tangibility greater than the original subject, it is possible for the actual identity of a person to become subordinate to the characterization presented in images and text. The print medium itself alters the tactile relationship between the humans involved: the ability to open and close a page or to completely abandon an article. It gives the reader the ability to control a representation of another human whose social standing likely outstrips their own. The ability to control and view a celebrity as an uninvited voyeur facilitates the process of objectification and defies normal social barriers. In this regard, the reader is imbued with a sort of omniscience in relation to the life and activities of the celebrity which acts as a limited form of pseudo-deification through the elimination of real class, social and physical threshholds within the liminoid space occupied by both the reader and the representation.

The characterization of the subject, whether viewed positively or negatively in light of the media coverage can determine which way the subject is moved along the slope of the uncanny valley. Assuming that all humans start off being considered human, the negative or positive elements of media coverage can make them seem either less than human or more human than humanly possible. In both circumstances, the subject is no longer considered a participant in the human experience. The end product of the tabloid magazine is designed to make it easy for the reader to forget the chain of events and production decisions that change a flesh and blood human being into an ink and paper publication on a supermarket rack. The process is not subtle, in fact Us Weekly magazine acknowledges this transformation when it reminds its readers every issue of the humanity of its subjects with its segment Just Like Us, featuring pictures of notable persons taking out the garbage or carrying groceries. In a sense, the public chooses to forget that soylent green is people… as advertised.

Placing the rise and fall of Michael Jackson’s career and persona on the slope of the uncanny valley, one can visually represent the process of dehumanization that occurs in tabloid press and the media at large. During the height of his career in the 1980s, he was propelled to superhuman status, complete with personal theme park. During that period his persona was virtually unassailable. With the rise of his legal troubles relating to child-molestation and financial problems, coupled with his apparent obsession with plastic-surgery, he was easily pushed backwards along the slope of the uncanny valley into the realm of sub-humanity. Because of negative tabloid coverage and his obvious physical changes, it is easy to imagine Michael Jackson as a freak of modern medicine, prowling for virginal young boys in his personal hunting reserve of roller-coasters, exotic animals and cotton candy. It is easier still to forget that he is a troubled human being. Putting aside Jackon’s celebrity status and the allegations of child-abuse, the tabloid’s exploitative media coverage of his changing physical appearance, whether due to vitiligo or cosmetic surgery addiction or what have you, it would be disgusting outside of the permissive environment of celebrity gossip. The ability to unrepentantly attack Jackson’s strange appearance facilitates the tabloid process of separating him from the human experience.

Tabloid magazines are ultimately propelled by their profit margins, the level of sensationalism or degree of personal violation is irrelevant in the face of the raw economics. The tabloids are selling their magazines, their ad space, the distorted representations of celebrities, but most importantly they are selling their own tabloid culture. This, naturally, brings us back to Us Weekly’s Just Like Us Feature, the implication being that if they are just like us, then we are just like them and therefore it is possible transcend our social origins and join the ranks of the supposedly revered. In his book Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity author Hal Niedzviecki describes the mass desire to become famous, “More and more people want to be special and noticed, and we want to create bigger, and better narratives, but our approach is to imitate established practices.”(Niedzviecki, 8) When the corporate entities responsible for this recognition of celebrity humanity publish Just Like Us they are not reminding us of how these representations are human; they are baiting a snare to snatch away our humanity. The dishonesty is found in the misdirection, “they” are just like “us”, so if “we” act like “them” then we can be famous too. The tabloid pitch is not a complete lie; inevitably new celebrities do rise from the masses, and that’s just fresh meat for the media grinder. Chuck Klosterman documents the intense personal toll of “living like a rock star” over a period of just 21 days in his book Killing Yourself to Live. He ruined entire portions of his life emulating the tabloid caricatures, and he didn’t even have the paparazzi egging him on and documenting his shortcomings. Even those who don’t become celebrities will strive to be like them, act like them and consume like them. Clothing, cars, makeup, haircuts these are the things the tabloids tell the public that separate “us” from “them” because it is certainly not taking out the garbage, everyone takes out the garbage. In that regard, celebrities are not the only victims of the tabloid magazines industry’s dehumanizing tactics, the general population suffers too. Celebrities are just bait in a trap at the bottom of the uncanny valley, tempting us to teeter on the precipice of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane to one another.

In the public eye, Michael Jackson has become a macabre curiosity. I find it ironic that the music video that propelled Michael Jackson to superstar status, Thriller, ultimately served as an omen of his fate. He has effectively, over the years, through poor personal choices and rabidly aggressive tabloid coverage become an inhuman creature, singing and dancing at the forefront of a pack of hopeful young celebrities and would-be celebrities falling to pieces under the pressure of popular culture’s most vicious manifestation: waiting room reading fodder.

Seeing Red

2008-10-11T00:09:00.001-04:00

Like every great noir mystery my story starts in a smoky hotel room, the sheets are rumpled and a single lamp lights the space from a cluttered desk. Only the room isn’t smoky, and the lamp isn’t on. There is no red-lipped seductress. It’s just that, for the sake of a good mystery, you really should include things like that: noir things. It wasn’t raining, I’m not even sure if it was cloudy. To say that it started in a dark hotel room on a clear autumn night would be okay, but lying in bed with a beautiful woman is more scintillating a start than lying in bed with itchy feet. Oh how they itched, taunting me. I’m a natural born hypochondriac, so my first thought is that I’ve somehow contracted athlete’s foot from walking around barefoot in my discount hotel room. I lie there, rubbing the heel of one foot over the toes of the other, scratching, wondering, building a case for flesh eating bacteria, for leprosy. The muscle relaxers kick in and I fall asleep.

The next morning I wake up, prepared to pee on my feet. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you have athlete’s foot, you’re supposed to pee on yourself. I have no idea if it cures leprosy, but I’m in the business of not taking chances, so I attack with the tools at hand. Years of conditioning fly out the window and I’m angling a stream of hot urine at my little piggies. I’m standing there, trying to get the angle right when I notice the spots on top of my feet, it isn’t athlete’s foot. I’ve peed all over myself for nothing. I rinse the piss off and step out of the shower, standing in front of the mirror I can see the rash, running across my shoulders in pink speckles and climbing the sides of my neck. My cheeks are flushed, and I know the rash is there too. At least I didn’t pee on my face.

Ideally, I’d have recognized the symptoms of an allergic reaction the night before, when I was in bed cycling through my overdeveloped mental medical dictionary trying to diagnose my ailment. Ideally, I would have brought the allergy medication with me that the doctor had prescribed when I got hives three weeks before. Instead, my allergic reaction has had a full night to spread and I’m almost three hours away from my Benadryl caplets. So I pack up and head out, wave goodbye to Hagerstown Maryland, a town which can only be described as a strip mall with gray human landfill growing out of its ass-end. I get as far as Harrisburg before I realize that I need instantaneous medication, the rash has spread over my whole face and its bright red and burning. Not quite noir lipstick red, but definitely sunburn red. I pulled into a gas station and made haste to the medical rack, purchased an antihistamine, filled the tank, and pondered the lotto. Fuck the lotto.

I got home, took another pill, ate lunch, drank a beer and went to sleep.

So what am I allergic to? I’m not sure yet, but that soft-shell crab is a likely culprit. Apples are also in the mix. I can probably live without shellfish, but what if its regular fish too? Tuna? There goes the neighborhood. My first hive breakout came at the tail-end of an anti-biotic regimen. Honestly, I preferred the idea of being allergic to the lifesaving medicine.

Conclusion

2008-10-02T22:39:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Monica and Alejandra for their contributions to the evening.

Monica: cityofotherlylove.tumblr.com

My debate live-blogging buddy. She showed up late, but she demanded beer. I understood.

Alejandra: alejandraramos.tumblr.com

My not-watching-the-debate live-blogging the buddy

Live Blogging the Vice Presidential Debate

2008-10-02T20:18:00.035-04:00

Alright, for those of you who don't know... as if anyone typically reads this... I'm going to be live blogging the Vice Presidential debate tonight. If you want to comment, chat or get a hold of me, then here are the approved methods of communication...

AIM: Renaissance Oz

MSN: ozrael@yahoo.com

Gmail: ryan.placchetti-at-gmail.com

Facebook

MySpace

Let that blogging begin.

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8:46pm: We are t-minus fifteen minutes and I'm running to the store to score some antacids. I'm foregoing the prescription muscle relaxers tonight on account of the fact that I'm planning to provide top-notch political commentary... or crack jokes. Either way, I want to be on my game as I slide toward the blurry abyss of inebriation. Of course, maybe when you look into the blurry abyss, the blurry abyss looks into you. Ask John McCain.

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9:02pm: Turned to WHYY Philadelphia public television. They're still working the pregame. Now they're introducing, and I could give a crap.

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9:13pm: "Can I call you Joe?" she asks... can I call you Joe?

Economic crisis

Joe opens with typical thanks to venue, all that shit. Appeals to the middle class, doesn't threaten to shoot his running mate. Good start.

Sarah is a little weaker, she talks a little bit about children's soccer games. Kisses John McCains ass and talks up McCains approach to the economic crisis... which, aside from suspending his campaign, is exactly the same as Barack Obama's.

Joe goes on the attack and points out McCain's inconsistent response to the crisis.

Sara rebukes him pretty soundly, but left herself open to some pretty obvious slap downs. Her attack of Obama's record of voting 96% on party lines begs to be countered with McCain's record of voting 95% with George Bush. Her analysis of the economic crisis is over simplified and she does a lot of sweetly put rebuking of the financial fat cats. She's not really offering any sort of solution or insight.

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9:15pm: Joe had a swift counter of Sara's attack on Obama's tax raising record by claiming that McCain raised taxes in the same vote.

Sara touted her mayoral record of cutting and killing taxes. Who the hell cares? She followed with her record as Governor, but honestly she's in her first term so how much could she REALLY have done?

Joe plays to the middle class again.

Sara calls him out, uses the term "redistribution of wealth" smart move. America hates a Commie. On that note, let's nuke China. We can practice on Cuba.

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9:20pm: Joe attacks the redistribution of wealth comment, but doesn't deny it. Not smart, Joe. He almost accused John McCain of being Barack Obama. That could make for a confusing election. If Obama's running mate can't figure out which ticket he's on

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9:28pm: New drinking rules posted. Look above. My poison is Victory Brewing Company's Golden Monkey, a Belgian style tripel, wonderful taste and 9.5% alcohol by volume. It's a strong brew, and delicious too.

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Global Warming

9:30pm: Sara skirts around it, she can't say that she doesn't believe in Global Warming. Grow some balls. What I want to know is if she believes in dinosaurs. Let's address the important issues. She has a strong history of fighting climate change, blah blah. Other countries did it.

Joe believes in man-made Global Warming, the polar icecap is melting, but the cookie dough icecream is doing dandy. China did it! Joe Biden wants to send the Chinese clean coal technology. You know, whenever someone sends government funded energy technology to China we throw their asses in jail. Joe, don't go that road.

Sara responds, "drill, baby, drill!" that's mature. I like how she quoted Biden there, her use of his use of the word "rape" was a nice follow on to "drill, baby, drill!"

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9:35pm: Joe says "John supports everything" there has been no truer statement in this campaign.

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Same Sex Marriage

9:36pm: Joe likes gay marriage, implies that he might be hot for Obama.

Sara likes gay marriage unless it means that gay people get married. She uses the word tolerant a lot, nice cover Valerie Plame.

Joe DOES NOT support gay marriage, but thinks they should be able have sex in hospital waiting rooms. He said it.

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9:40pm: NEW DRINKING RULES POSTED

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Iraq, Pakistan and Iran

9:42pm: Joe says no free rides for iraqi asshats. We're giving them a bunch of money, and they're making a bunch of money. Time to cut them off.

Sara points out Bidens own big mouth. Promoted from Captain to Major Obvious.

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9:47pm: EVERYBODY DRINK TWICE! Ahmedenijibab!

Sara Palin nucular. Let the legacy of mispronunciation continue.

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9:50pm: Sara pounces on the Obama no preconditions policy. I'm actually for it. I don't think sanctions are making anyone warm to us. She brings up the wiping Israel off the face of the Earth quote. I'll find the NPR interview with the official American translator of Ahmedinejabberwocky that correctly translates that statement as "Israel will fade from the pages of history." Big F'ing difference.

Joe brings the pain. He just schooled Saracuda on the Iranian command structure.

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9:55pm: Sara promises that the Republican ticket isn't George Bush. Change is coming, buzz word.

Joe attacks McCain's foreign policy similarities with GW. He wants America to be respected. Machiavelli wants America to be feared. Barack Obama wants a cigarette.

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10:00pm: Sara says that counterinsurgency can work in Afghanistan... then why isn't it?

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10:02pm: I'd love to set a rule that makes Bosniak a drinkable word... but I don't think it's worth even typing.

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10:03pm: SLAM A BEER!

The format for this debate is killing the excitement. I'd like to see these two kids go at eachother's throats.

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10:06pm: Monica just got here, a little late.

Joe says that Obama knew from the start but that he was an idiot.

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Whatcha gonna do if John McCain keels or some racist blows Obama's brains out?

I don't understand why Biden's administration should be that much different than Obama's. Joe slips off topic and starts talking about 1932. McCain remembers 1932, he disagrees with Joe's tangent.

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10:13pm: Everyone gets extra-credit tonight. I'm emailing my professors.

Sara: "Of course we know what a Vice President does!"

Thank goodness.

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10:15pm: Joe Biden has a history of getting things done. He also has a history of staying stupid shit.

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Tell me your weakness!

10:18pm: I can answer this for both candidates. "I don't have any weakness."

Sara has a special needs child? Bullshit. She just had that baby. What special needs does he have? Changing diapers? Boob milk? Come on... babies eat and shit, that's it. Tell me about your special needs child in 10 years.

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10:18pm:Joe Biden talks about the death of his wife and daughter. Gets choked up, holds it in. Man rules abided by. I approve.

Drinking game abandoned. This system moves too slow.

For some reason when Sara was talking about how many shots John McCain takes in Washington... I couldn't help but think of porn.

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10:27pm: Fuck it, muscle relaxers down the hatch.

Joe Biden just said the most profoundly compelling thing of the evening I think. He talked about the good intentions of most people who choose to serve their country in congress. I agree whole heartedly.

Sara echoes bipartisanship, and quickly changes topic. It just seemed like a thin response in the wake of that.

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Closing statements

10:29pm: I like you Joe. I hate being picked apart by the main stream media. Quote Ronald Reagan... is she running for class President? Wow, that was terrible.

Joe opens up with some excellent weight, speaks to the American people directly and somberly. Amazing, all the way up to the shout out to the troops.

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1035pm: New York Times columnist David Brooks has a very low threshhold of entertainment.

I'm sure on Fox News Sean Hannity is acting like a douche bag. Somewhere, somehow.

The debate was boring, it was safe.

10:55pm: My final conclusion? The first half of the debate was pretty tame, but Biden broke out in the second half and out human-being'd Palin. He hit all the marks with solemness and gravity. A lot of people will say that Sarah Palin won by not getting smeared into the turf, but that's not good enough. I walked into this expecting her to get spanked barring a massive fumble by Biden. So, good job VP candidates for not screwing the pooch tonight. Sara, you didn't ramble incoherently, Joe... you didn't threaten to counter-invade Mexico.

I felt like tonight really just checked some boxes, with the exception of a few standout moments where Biden broke ahead of the two person pack. The debate format ultimately reigned both candidates in and created a safe zone where neither of them could scuttle their ticket. Yay?

TV Ninjas and the Decline of a Brotherhood

2008-09-11T16:26:00.003-04:00

This is actually a paper I wrote for my Popular Culture Writing Class. It's supposed to be my first draft, but I have a really hard time letting other people read my writing before I've polished it at least a little bit. So, since I have a little over an hour before I need to hand this thing in, I figured I'd post it here.

I should note that I've exaggerated the emptiness of my relationship with my brothers. In spite of what can be inferred from this paper, I do in fact love my siblings. That said, there is a great deal of truth here. I was gone for nearly 7 years of their lives and we grew very much apart in that time. Such is life I suppose. Anyway, enjoy...

TV Ninjas and the Decline of a Brotherhood

There are elements within popular culture that work, either actively or passively, to subvert or replace social bonds that have historically formed the foundation of family life. In the case of my family, a disagreement over the fundamental hipness of imported Japanese cartoons has destroyed my credibility to perform the traditional role of an older brother. In more general terms, popular icons, institutions and tastes can come to substitute the seats of conventional authority figures, role models, and filial relationships. This often brings about a reconstitution of personal hierarchies of value. The now somewhat cliché statement “punk rock saved my life” serves to illustrate how a popular cultural phenomenon or an aspect of it, can assume a role of elevated importance that traverses the chasm between mere appreciation and complete reverence. Punk rock is not a miracle pharmaceutical, nor has it ever held an alcohol intervention, and while it has given individuals experiencing feelings of loneliness or disenfranchisement a sense of community and voice, I am fairly certain that it does not know the Heimlich maneuver. A far cry from a cultural embodiment of the Good Samaritan, punk rock has never and will never actually save anyone’s life. Ultimately, the deciding virtue that allows popular culture manifestations to supplant traditional cultural institutions and rearrange social valuations is the emphasis of an in-the-moment coolness that is conspicuously absent from the average family foyer or rumpus room.

Popular culture commentator Chuck Klosterman ascribes the yearning to be considered cool in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs as a desire to be included in an exclusive group.
“The desire to be cool is--ultimately—the desire to be rescued. It’s the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society. It’s the desire to be advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, mostly because they all lived the same pedestrian life. Without the spoils of exclusionary coolness, we’re just cogs in the struggle.”
Coolness, in that respect, is not a new concept. The Rapture described in the Bible, namely that the obedient will be plucked from the Earth by the hand of God and delivered into paradise while those lacking the foresight to accept the teachings of Jesus Christ burn in Hell, has many of the same elements of compliance yielding reward as the idea that one might score backstage passes at a Toby Keith concert for arriving in the right denim on denim ensemble. Inevitably, these esoteric circles, in whichever form they take, come to define two distinct groups: those who are in the circle and those who are not, namely, the cool and the uncool.

The apparatus of our popular culture dissemination is completely unprecedented in the scope of human history. Widespread cultural change that would have taken years, or even centuries to establish can now be propagated with the click of a button. Through the course of most of human existence, cultural generations passed more slowly than genealogical generations, meaning that all living members of any given household were likely cut from the same ideological cloth, sharing values, opinions and a generally homogenous view of the world. Illustrating this modern change of pace explains why we can lump sixty-odd years of style and fashion into the Victorian era, but can only account for the non-ironic rise and fall of feathered rock star hair within the comparative blip of the nineteen-eighties. It is the rapidity of cultural permutation which allows elements of modern popular culture to undermine traditional cultural institutions in the home by creating cultural generation gaps over exponentially shorter periods of time.

These two factors, the exclusionary nature of coolness and the rapidity with which popular culture transforms, create divisions within even singular genealogical generations of a household. In my own family, I can point to popular cultural divides that separate me from not only my parents, but also my siblings. I have three brothers between five and seven years younger than me. In the few years that separate us, changes in television programming instilled in them a different set of qualifiers for what constituted coolness. My brothers’ unified concept of cool was reinforced by their closeness in age and affirmed, in their minds, as a universal manifestation of good taste. In a way, they are their own cultural generation. Having left home when the eldest of them was only thirteen I was not present during the years in which they formed their cultural identities. In the absence of my influence they learned how to evaluate coolness from the most readily available authority in the home: a 32-inch television filled with Japanese cartoons. My traditional role as a cultural mentor was effectively usurped in my absense.

I formed a fairly staunch opinion regarding Japanese cartoons and related pop culture transplants sometime in early 1997 during the brief sensation surrounding the Tamagatchi virtual pet, a keychain-bound digital critter that responded to the imaginary nurturing of its owner. I suspect that I was either too old or too sensible to be particularly enamored with the prospect of caring for my very own two-dimensional, big-eyed, fake monstrosity. The Tamagatchi was only the tip of the spear, it was soon followed by wave after wave of similarly themed video-games and more importantly, in so far as indoctrinating my own flesh and blood goes, television programming. I should note, the aspect that separated this wave of Japanese cultural immigration from previous transplants, i.e. Godzilla, Ultraman, Voltron/Power Rangers, Transformers/Gobots, was the lengths to which the marketing machinery of a primarily television originated product was able to inculcate itself in the lives of its audience by extending itself into other mediums. My brothers’ collective taste in television programs informed their taste in music, video games, card games, board games, clothing, internet surfing and, in the case of at least one brother, pornography.

As a result of our opposing views regarding the merits of Japanese cartoons we have very little cultural common ground. My opinions regarding my brothers’ preferred television programming do more than simply rob us of mutually interesting conversation pieces, they diminish our relationships. American satirist Ambrose Bierce’s 1911 publication of The Devil’s Dictionary defines admiration as the polite recognition of another’s resemblance to one’s self. This tongue-in-cheek appraisal of why we hold others in esteem seems to cut to the root of my problem, there is no mutual admiration between us because there is nothing either camp is willing to admire. Just as my brothers chose a surrogate role model in the absence of an older brother, once I realized I had lost my relationship with them, I sought out replacement siblings with similar qualifications for coolness within my own peer group. In essence, the combination of my failure to assume my traditional role within the family unit and the rapid rise of an unfamiliar and even personally detestable popular culture phenomenon has caused my family to become strangers and strangers to become my family. This is a clear revaluation of my hierarchies of social importance. Recognizing changes in popular culture cannot exonerate me of my complicity in this process. It is for sake of pride in my generation of cool that I have exiled my brothers to a cultural wasteland of their own choosing to reside in a familial ghetto of my design.

Another LNHFCOJ Excerpt

2008-07-01T20:07:00.005-04:00

I know I haven't updated in a bit. I've been working on four different chapters. Oh, and I've been lazy. Still here's an excerpt from a chapter I've been working on injecting into the middle of the already completed chapters... here's the new Chapter 7...

Chapter 7

Night, Day 15: Mack Rises

“Do you know why we pledge allegiance to our flag, Mack?”

Mack’s eyes creaked open, feeling piggishly pink and swollen with disuse. He tested his atrophied eyelids cautiously, blinking snapshots of his surroundings as he lolled his head from side to side. The language of his movement repeated to the world, motion for motion, what his body was telling him: no.

“It’s part of a process. You little ones, lined up front to back, standing, your hands held earnestly over your tiny hearts.” Mrs. McGillis said. She hunched forward, her elbows on her knees, the wooden chair beneath her creaked a melody to the harmonious backdrop of her groaning old bones.

Mack could picture the new schoolhouse and its river of sparkling pale green tiles lying flat and thick with polish over the length of floor, slipping down the long rectangular corridor and around the distant bend. The squalling notes of his pounding tennis shoes shot out like sparks from his heals as he ran the empty afternoon halls, wide-eyed and laughing, his mouth open. The heavy wooden doors with their thick glass windows, the kind filled with chicken-wire mesh to tornado-proof them, whooshed past the corners of his eyes, the second-hand sunshine from the classrooms oozing out to cast a soft light into the halls. His even-cut mop of dark brown hair bounced as he laughed and turned, and skidded through corners. Davey Gimble was miles behind, his own bubbling joy bouncing off the rows of white-washed cinderblocks.

“Before you could read you were inducted into the screwball idea that everything that flag represents is good. Bear in mind that, at the time, you had no concept of good or evil. You understood praise and punishment, and every day you were compelled to praise those stars and stripes, vocally and before God himself. That’s some serious shit, Mack.”

An uncased electric fan pushed hot air over Mack’s body, evaporating the sweat from his skin. He felt broken, lying in the dark room. The muffled sounds of broadcast radio pushed through the thin doorway over Mrs. McGillis’ shoulder, buzzing like a well tuned bee against her tinny vocals.

“As a child, your logic is animalistic, base, assumptive. The primitive portions of your brain gather through observation, through stimulus, through trial and error mimicry.” She paused, unclasping the pocketbook on her lap.

“This is how a child learns to walk and talk and salute flags.” Her backbones snapped rhythmically as she straightened in the chair. The sound rose from the depths of her spine and it ascended like the clatter of daisy-chained firecrackers to the base of her skull. The racket rattled her medulla oblongata, a primitive portion of her brain. She pulled a slender pack of cigarettes from her pocketbook, displaying them like a magician who had just conjured a rabbit from the confines of an empty cap. Mack was in prime position to be sawed in half.

Shorts swishing, backwards and forwards around his scrawny legs, Mack ran as fast as his knobby knees knew how. Spelling tests and big-headed self-portraits ruffled in his wake as he careened towards the heavy set of double-doors ahead. He pushed hard, his lungs yanking for air, the burning muscles of his legs pitted against the open-hearted laughter of his mouth in a battle over where oxygen ought to go. He smashed into the left door, full-force, arms reaching. The heels of his palms blasted the handle forward, pushing the metal bar almost completely to the wood. He burst into the spring air and leapt, clearing the three steps down and a sidewalk square, landing in the grass. He staggered a few steps, slowing, pushing his hands against his haunches and doubling over to gather his breath. To harvest oxygen for all his parts that needed it. His rolling laughter faded to an uncontrollable red-faced grin, and he panted, reenergizing his body. Already he was storing up for the gloating to come. He turned to watch for Davey, perking his ears for his friend’s footsteps.

“It’s a process, drawing conclusions based on the incomplete statistical data your itty bitty brain gathered in those few short years. Do you know what that’s called, Mack?” She slid a delicate cigarette from the pack and coiled her lips around its filter. She cocked her head to the side, popping her jaw bone out of place briefly as she angled her face away from the fan. She produced a lit match, held her face to the fire and the tip of the cigarette crackled to life as she inhaled. “Inductive reasoning.”

“Consequently, you established convictions beyond the limits of your own understanding, drew conclusions with incomplete data, fabricated concrete systems of belief in a world without absolutes.” Your lower brain trumped your upper brain, and those convictions came to form the base of knowledge by which you would examine the world you live in.”

Mack rolled his head over the bump of his shoulder, facing the old specter. Her jaundiced skin glistened, sweaty and hot in the dim light that crept through the broken door jam and its gutted doorknob companion. The lines around her mouth drew tautly around the cigarette, forming a noose. Her yellowed fingertips clutched at the filter, though it never left the stranglehold of her lips, her hand splayed across her chin as she sucked smoke in and breathed smoke out.

“At the root of everything you hold to be true now are those formative years of development: hand pressed faithfully to your breast, repeating word for word admonishments of a society you knew squat about. Human beings, are compelled to define in linear terms this alinear universe using a less than linear method of crunching figures. You see? All those ones and zeros? The limitations? Never allowing for the possibility of twos. That is the flawed clicking of an imperfect animal apparatus.”

Mack opened his mouth, the dehydrated ridges of his lips were stuck together with old spit and blood. He pried them open, stagnant air sank past his teeth dragging the stale smoke of Mrs. McGillis’ cigarette. His lungs pushed air to form words, but the frog croak that crawled out of his throat failed to express any sort of opinion at all.

Davey’s laughter buffeted against the solid doors, the rhythm of his feet joining the cascade of noise as he neared his destination. Mack stood up, his cheeks still flushed, and a thin sheen of sweat dampening his brow. He wiped his face with his hands, trying to hide his labor, trying to hide how badly he had wanted to win the race. Mack charged back up the stairs, wedging the sole of his shoe into the base of the double doors where the crack split the entrance. He set his shoulder into the wood and bent his back leg, bracing himself, grinning a stupid youthful grin, calculating the physics of comedy. He could hear Davey drawing nearer, his laughter, his footsteps, his hands pounding into the metal bar, the click of the latch, his body hitting the door, the crack of his round freckled skull bouncing off an unexpected wall, and the dull thud of flesh, blood and bone against polished floor. Then, silence.

“Men create opposition. Ideologies do not come into conflict with one another, only bodies which define themselves ideologically can. The concepts of capitalism can’t knife socialist tenets in a dark alley. There has to be a hand in the mix. A collectivist farm plan can’t poison an up trending stock market. It takes a KGB agent sticking a syringe a stockbroker’s muffin to do that. You see?”

The ash lengthened on the end of Mrs. McGillis’ cigarette, long and gray, bending with the pulsating breath of the fan. Mack worked the muscles in his throat, trying to slide the coagulated phlegm from the back of his mouth across the dusty pipes of his throat. He spread his jaw and pumped his tongue like a derrick drilling for saliva, for lubrication. He agonized.

“Water.”

“Davey?” Mack whispered, his lips pressed against the crack. “Are you okay, Davey? Say somethin’!”

He shuddered as he heaved the door back, warily prying it open, afraid for what he might find. Davey was lying flat on his back, arms and legs perfectly straight, like a toppled action figure. Blood puddled outward from his head, and came in trickling cranberry waterfalls from his bent nose. He lay on his back, eyes blinking, chipped-tooth mouth searching for words.

“Davey?”

Blood and silence.

“Davey?”

Davey shuddered, a high pitched gurgle rose from his insides, crickets and iced milk in a martini tumbler. Chirping, sloshing, screaming. He sat up, the hair on the back of his head heavy with blood, he grabbed at his face smearing the long crooked lines of blood into even rosy streaks over his freckle-spotted face. He looked at his hands in disbelief. His jaw dropped, and he sat, jagged mouthed and howled into the emptiness of the school. Mack slammed the door shut and ran, over the field towards the crouched blackberry thickets of the wood line.

“Authority is a savage affair. You can’t make an omelet without raping a few chickens. That’s the trick of government isn’t it? Making the chickens proud, grateful for getting fucked, so long as someone looks like they’re keeping the foxes out of the coup. In order to govern the powers that be have got to maintain the ruse of purpose, and so they make you swear up and down your whole life that the government you’ve got has all the answers, that it’s the best damn thing out there in a terrifying world of violence and desperation, that you got lucky to live under thumb of such a benevolent giant. They get folks crying Commie, crying fascist, crying terrorist, rapist, pedophile, dissident, rabble-rouser, thief, liar, the list of foxes goes on and on. They get chickens clucking at shadows in the dark. What about America? Well, Mack, even free-ranged chickens get fucked.”

The long ash flaked off of her cigarette landing on the polka-dotted short sleeve of her dress. She puckered her lips, tilting the remnant of filter and tobacco upward. Her lips curled tightly at the corner before the black hole of her mouth popped open snapping the burnt wick of the cigarette up. She swallowed quickly, the inky smoke of burning flesh escaping her pinched nostrils in two quick puffs.

Finally. A LNHFCOJ (Adam Blue) Sample and Update.

2008-05-18T09:02:00.006-04:00

Sweet Christmas. After that last update, as some of you know, I hit a wall in my work. It has taken me a month to write this chapter. That's one part laziness, two part self-defeat and one part Grand Theft Auto. I know. The guiltiest contributor to my non-contribution was self-defeat. Once the chapter started kicking my ass, the ass kicking snowballed. For example, I spent about two hours on an off last night working, and I came up with about a half page of work. Not good right? Better than I've been doing over the past month. I woke up this morning, and I kicked its ass, I knocked out the chapter and I'm ready to move the hell on.

Having this blockage has certainly helped in a number of ways. I realized a number of problems with my book that I will now, instead of being unaware, ignore. Yay? You bet. I can worry about some of the smaller character and narrative problems when I have a manuscript finished. So without further circumnavigation of the proverbial bush here's the chapter that throttled me for a month, in its entirety. Please, I would appreciate any feedback you have. I know this isn't my best work, but I really need a third party to look this over. I've lost my perspective on this piece.

Late Night, Day 29: A Dog's Whimper

Adam sat atop a high and crooked chair. He scanned the tightly packed rooftops of eastern Baghdad. His jaw worked circles, cracking sunflower seeds open; his tongue pushed the shells to the front of his mouth and he spat them into the shadows. Silence seemed to climb down from the cloudless sky and settle on the city such that the grinding of Adam’s teeth and the plopping of sunflower shells filled the air.

Cowboy slumped heavily against the moon in a deep drunkard’s slumber. His legs were flopped across the spectacle of night, his toes pointing haphazardly at nothing. The machinery of the universe went on without him, whirling circles and creating conundrums for physicists with nothing better to do than ponder the architecture of majesty. Subjects of wonderment were not in short supply. Existence was notably prolific in matters of scientific intrigue and beauty.

Adam’s attention sprang from rooftop to rooftop, warily assessing the plump shadows of pigeons adorning the flat-topped houses. In their perches they were ominous gargoyles overlooking the open caskets of the city’s motley side-streets. Adam knew, beyond any doubt, that danger lurked in the unlit catacombs of the world below. The acidic stench of burning tires wafted down there, hinting at the hellacious flame-belching creatures that prowled the Iraqi capital during curfew hours. Adam could imagine them, with their jutting spines and hooked claws, combing through the garbage strewn alleys and searching for helpless human beings as the burnt fumes tumbled from the razor-sharp thickets of their mouths.

Peter snapped the quietness by unsnapping his Kevlar helmet. He tossed it to the wooden table separating him from Adam. Peter shook his head, tossing beads of sweat around him.

“I’m bored.” He announced.

Adam shrugged half-heartedly, not particularly caring whether or not Peter found guard duty entertaining. The significance of his gesture was lost on his companion, either obfuscated by the darkness of the night or by the cloud of self-involvement that perpetually blinded Peter. In effect, Adam did nothing.

“You know what makes me crazy?” Peter asked as reached for the pack of cigarettes Adam had left on the table.

“No. Not really.” Adam answered.

Adam knew what made him crazy, his brain. Adam couldn’t reconcile the astounding differences between his imaginary world and the real one. They were equally convincing to the point that Adam dared not take one more seriously than the other. In this respect, he wasn’t much different than most soldiers; he lived in one world and believed wholeheartedly in another. His world had less bureaucracy.

Peter waited expectantly for Adam to prompt him to continue. He tucked the cigarette between his lips, and stared over the military paraphernalia cluttering the top of the table between them. He leaned backward and ripped his body armor open. The dank odor of trapped sweat issued forth from his exposed uniform. Peter tilted forward, leaning so low over the table that the radio’s LED light haunted the features of his face.

“Do you want to know what makes me crazy, Adam?” Peter asked again, mustering a bit more force in his voice.

“What makes you crazy, Peter?” Adam replied.

“A lot of things, the war for example… Here we are, the richest nation on the planet, and we’re puttering around with guns in the third world. We’re the most powerful country ever to exist, and we’ve got nothing better to do than come here and kill innocent people. The irony is that we can provide for ourselves, but we’re here to rob them blind.” Peter said as he lit up a stolen smoke.

“What about freedom?” Adam asked.

“Who said anything about freedom, man?” Peter replied.

“Colonel Mack did, Adam. Tell him that. Tell him the truth about this country, and how you’re all doing the best that you can. Tell him that you’re making the world a better place.” The moon whispered.

“Colonel Mack believed in freedom.” Adam pointed out.

Adam’s fingers loaded a sunflower seed into his mouth, positioned it, and then cracked it open. His tongue went through the rote process of aligning the shell behind his puckered lips for ejection. Pressure built behind the shell and it exploded into the night, departed to whereabouts unknown. Adam pushed another seed in to fill the void.

“Look, I’m not going to dance on the guy’s grave, but fucking hell, dude. How were we supposed to take him seriously? He talked a lot, but it was all tow-the-line bullshit, you know that right? He was either a liar or he drank too much neo-conservative Kool-Aid. Either way, war is the providence of fools and a paradise for thieves.” Peter said.

“What’s that make you then?” Adam asked.

“A fool, I think,” Peter quipped, “but the first step is admitting you have a problem and we have problems, Adam. Human rights violations, corruption, torture, cronyism, political apathy, the works, man. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much that’s wrong with our country, and with this war specifically. Take us for example, how symbolic are we? Right here, right now, we’re sitting in the dark with loaded guns, waiting for something terrible to happen. We’re a microcosm of America, man.”

“We’re a microcosm of the whole universe. Everything is sitting in the dark and waiting for something terrible to happen.” Adam said. He spat the shell of another gutted sunflower seed. The dusty terrain of the floor was littered with the remains of Adam’s conquest. The husks were twisted in silent repose, their jagged mouths agape at the world.

“The universe is gorgeous.” The moon demurred as she laid Cowboy down. She tilted his worn hat over his eyes and beamed affectionately upon him. “It’s so beautiful and full of love.”

“You have to work hard to see the love.” Adam lamented.

Peter sucked in a lung full of smoke, and exhaled.

“Do you ever wonder why you’re here? Why you’re not safe at home? Why you’re putting your neck on the line to further some rightwing politician?” Peter spouted.

“Sometimes, I wonder what it’s like to live in Paris,” Adam said. “…but no, man. I don’t worry about that crap. I’ve got bigger problems.”

Adam cataloged his worries. Being in Iraq ranked somewhere south of lurking pigeons and somewhere north of accidentally drinking urine. Indoor plumbing was a faraway luxury and empty bottles spared lazy soldiers the trouble of seeking out relief. The risk of putting lips to human waste was real; the risk of being eaten was probably not. Adam wasn’t taking chances. He sniffed every water bottle skeptically before slaking his thirst and kept a wary eye on guard against Colonel Fretter’s terrifying smile.

“That’s ridiculous, Blue.” Peter said.

“Really? I just like to know what I’m putting in my mouth.”

Peter’s brow pretzeled above his eyewear, perspiration ran through the salty draws formed by the rearranged topography of his face. He contemplated the silence in the wake of Adam’s cryptic admission. In the Army, any reference to putting anything in one’s mouth was typically followed by a heartless appraisal of one’s dick sucking capacity. As a matter of fostering his self-anointed image as an enlightened soul, Peter had trouble reconciling his compassion for oppressed minorities with the day to day jawing of military humor. Cleverly, he shifted his attention to a passing convoy of Iraqi soldiers.

The white pickup trucks slipped from the blackness beneath a groaning concrete overpass bridging Route Werewolf. They shot through a police checkpoint, and for a moment roared parallel to the walls of FOB Bastion. In the back of each truck, an Iraqi gunman clutched an RP-46 light machinegun that had been fastened to a mount built into the open bed. Other soldiers lounged against the battered sides, hanging their heads like upside-down dogs in the rushing torrent of air. Their individual features were inscrutable behind their drenched ski-masks. The convoy carried on into the distance, unaware that they had broken the boring passage of guard duty and saved Peter from compromising his sense of self-righteousness.

“Nice masks, assholes.” Peter snapped.

“Yeah.” Adam agreed.

“So anyway, dude, this is imperialism. We are the evil empire, and dreaming of greener pastures isn’t going to change that.” Peter said.

“I don’t think I’ve done that at all.” Adam objected. “Green pastures would be a relief. You should see my dreams. They’re horrible. This morning I woke up sweaty, everything stank like apple pie. Apple pie guts smell like cinnamon and sugar. They made a pie out of me, Peter, a fucking pie. I swear to God, I could taste it in mouth.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously.”

“That’s out there.”

“I know.”

“See? That's some of this shit I’m talking about. Here, we’ve been in country for a month and you’re already suffering from post-traumatic stress. You were sentenced to a lifetime of psychological instability. For what?”

Adam said nothing.

“Hegemony. That’s what. We came here looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are the nuclear missiles? I haven’t seen any mushroom clouds. How about the chemical weapons? The anthrax? Anything? Let me put this into perspective for you, Adam. You and I are subjected to the inherent evils of war so that we can bolster the inherent evils of big corporations. Our politicians are bought and paid for, our government is bought and paid for, and you and I, by virtue of association, are bought and paid for. We’re just commodities… seed capital sent to a foreign market to increase oil revenues, expand the market, and establish the American brand. When big money and government become one and the same there is no dividing line between what constitutes an empire and what constitutes a monopoly.”

“What’s that mean?” Adam asked as he propped an elbow onto the table, leaning closer to Peter.

“Oh, Adam, you don’t want to know.” The moon moaned.

“I want to know.” Adam emphasized.

“It means that we’re evil, Adam. Every single person that puts this uniform on is an evil son of a bitch. Either by choice or by ignorance.” Peter said.

“What about you?” Adam asked. He was fairly convinced that he wasn’t evil, but was willing to give Peter a chance to convince him otherwise.

“I’m different, Adam. I’m a witness to the destruction of Iraq. I’m going to blow the whistle on this whole fucking catastrophe. I’m going to report every fucking war crime I see.” Peter announced. He took a hard drag from his cigarette and exhaled. A curtain of smoke rose from his mouth over the mirrored surfaces of his eyeglasses.

“How many do you have so far?” Adam asked.

“None yet,” Peter replied, the flame of his cigarette alighting his scowl, “but I’m watching and listening to everything, man. I will be the agent of this army’s integrity. When it stumbles, I will be the voice of record trumpeting its failure.”

“What a little asshole.” Cowboy mumbled as he rolled over, his hand clung to his crotch unceremoniously as he loosened the denim around his balls.

Peter saw himself as a herald of better things, a higher conscience slumming amongst morally impotent stooges. He held fast to the elitist idea that goodness resided in the minds and not in the hearts of men. He believed that ignorance begat villainy, and he was mostly right, except that sometime ignorance was the product of a neglected heart. For all his intellect, Peter was an ignorant son of a bitch and his heart was a lonesome sparrow.

“I find it ironic,” Adam began, “that Americans have no trouble questioning the value of freedom... when it's not their own at stake.”

“Horseshit, and I’ll tell you why.” Peter said as he flicked his cigarette over FOB Bastion’s grimy wall, paying no mind to the fire that could have erupted below.

An ear-rending blast erupted in the distance rattling the chain-link fence wrapped around the observational level of the guard tower. The concussion flattened the cloth of Adam’s uniform against his balmy skin and knocked an expelled sunflower husk back against his face. It stuck to his cheek. Smoke rose over the charcoal of the Baghdad skyline. It pitched vertically, upending itself and billowing towards the polished luminescence of the moon.

Peter leapt to his feet, clutching his rifle fearfully. He scanned the darkened alleyways, moaning fearfully.

“Oh shit, fucking shit.”

He drew his eye behind the rear sight aperture aligning his vision of the world with death. He jerked the barrel of his rifle from open alley to open alley, searching for assassins.

“Shit.”

A clatter of metal and wood exploded from the darkness and Peter let loose a shot. Something yelped, and whimpered dismally. He and Adam sat upon their high and crooked chairs, listening to the sounds of a dying dog.

A pillar of charcoal colored smoke rose ominously from the Baghdad skyline, wafting into a black cloud of defeat. Beneath it, a truck of masked men lay burnt and bleeding.

The pigeons abandoned their rooftop perches, the beating of their wings roared against the high pitch tone echoing in Adam’s eardrums. He turned away as they descended upon the dog.

A Resolve to Confess and Some Adam Blue Updates

2008-04-13T13:57:00.008-04:00

Of late, I have felt a sort of strange compulsion to straighten out my affairs. I also feel compelled to talk about it. It's not that my affairs have been terribly despicable, but rather that I have felt a renewed sense of purpose in life. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm going somewhere, and I want to feel good about how I got there. I don't think I've been a bad person, but I certainly feel like my life could use a dose of transparency. I feel like I should be able to walk into any room with a clean conscience. There are certainly things I've done in life that I'm not proud of and I feel the weight that comes along with shame. I think shame is the knowledge that you've done something wrong, or dishonest, and that you're capable of doing it again. Shame is the recognition of a weak resolve, and the only real redemption is knowing for sure that you won't make the same mistakes in the future.

I've been guilty of so many things over the years, most of them were crimes against myself. My most frequent trespasses have been: laziness, apathy, self-loathing, hubris, vanity, doubt and a litany of other smaller sins. That's about as far as I'm going to take my public confessions, I think I reveal a lot of my failings through my writing. When you create a character you pour in pieces of yourself, you project the things you see inside of yourself into these characters. It's a sort of way to secretly broadcast the things you want the world to know, but you get to hide it under the guise of hypothetical people. Not all my characters' failings are mine, but mine do sneak in there from time to time.

It's strange, that in spite of all the struggles I've had with faith and the concept of religion, I've never had any doubt about fate. Maybe that's how it starts? The idea that the journey is just as important as the destination. I know where I'm going, with an eerily prescient clarity and I know I have the opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. The trick is getting there and walking into that room with a clean conscience.

This is an outlook I've been circling around for a long time, and suddenly it began to feel like an attainable goal. I feel like I can live a better life, and be wiser for having made mistakes, having leaped too soon so many times, having taken my good fortune for granted, having fallen into the trap of disillusionment. Outlook is everything.

It's already begun to propel my writing again, a small difference with a very big impact on how I view myself and my accomplishments as a person. Who knows what other parts of my life will be affected? I might even go for a run, but admittedly I don't really feel guilty about not exercising just yet... I've got bigger demon-fish to fry. I'm not writing because I'm inspired. I'm living because I'm inspired, and the writing just kind of comes along part and parcel.

I'm better than I was, but I've got a long way to go yet.

On the matter of fate, it's hard to bypass coincidences sometimes. As I wrote this blog, The Who's A Quick One While He's Gone came on my Last FM broadcast. It's a song about a woman whose husband is a sailor, and when he doesn't return home she assumes that he's lost at sea. She has an affair, thinking that her husband is dead. When he returns home, she confesses her sins to him...

I can't believe it
Do my eyes deceive me?
Am I back in your arms?
Away from all harm?

It's like a dream to be with you again
Can't believe that I'm with you again

I missed you and I must admit
I kissed a few and once did sit
On Ivor the Engine Driver's lap
And later with him, had a nap

You are forgiven, you are forgiven, you are forgiven ... (ad lib)

You are forgiven

The last chorus really grabbed my attention.

"You are forgiven" over and over again. Sometimes it's just nice to hear, and I heard it just when I needed to. Fate is a funny thing.

All that said, I now present the fruit of my recent toils. I haven't posted a sample in over two weeks, so I'm putting a longer one here. This chapter is still feeling a little rough, but it's done, so I can rip it up next time I read through it. Feel free to offer comments and criticisms.

Chapter 7

Evening, Day 24: Adam Blue and the Cannibal Luau

“Adam,” the moon whispered conspiratorially “you’re in the clear. Go!”

Adam dug his hands into his pockets. They were deep and toasty against the cool air of the Baghdad night. His hands twisted like tigers in the lightless nylon and cotton blended jungles of his pockets. Adam stood on a marble patio scanning the near edge of the courtyard; his wayward mitts spelunking illegally into the cavernous depths of what he had come to learn, through his time in the Army, as forbidden territory. He checked the handful of scattered soldiers for rank sufficient enough to care about the interactions shared between his trouser pockets and his hands. In the Army, leaders could define themselves by how well they guarded other peoples’ pockets against those same peoples’ hands.

“Now, I reckon you’re gonna have to tell me again, buckaroo. Why can’t y’all put your hands in your pockets?” Cowboy asked.

Adam shrugged, the cigarette in his mouth glowing at its tip.

“Well, a long time ago, there was a mix up at a laundromat, and some General got his pants mixed up with a bunch of other pants. All that camouflage looked the same. The thing is, that General had something really important in his pocket. He wouldn’t say what it was… nuclear launch codes or something.” Adam said, taking a drag before continuing.

“The only way he could keep that really important something from falling into the wrong hands was to make sure no one ever found it. So he told everyone to keep their hands out of their pockets, and that’s just what they did. Only now, everyone forgot why, and those pants are probably long gone, and that important something is long gone too, but we still don’t put our hands in our pockets, and no one knows why.” Adam said.

“You bullshittin’ son of a gun, Adam. You got no clue, do you?” Cowboy said.

Adam blew out jet of smoke.

“Nope.” He said. He wasn’t alone.

The stark emptiness lurking in the lives of soldiers was filled with unspoken games. The contests pitted the slyness of the junior enlisted against the observational skills of their seniors. Younger soldiers would see how long they could break the rules before their leaders caught them. Peter Potter had once grown a full beard, but eventually abandoned the endeavor when Sergeant Alcott failed to notice. These games were essential to the morale of the unit, without them soldiers in key leadership positions would probably have blown their own brains out for lack of perceived purpose.

Additionally, the restrictions placed on the putting of hands in pockets helped to justify the existence of other soldiers. These soldiers worked in remote offices; they produced pamphlets, handbooks, and instructional note cards to fill the vacancies left by the evicted hands. Thanks to the contents of Adam’s pockets, he knew that ‘personal courage’ was a value that the Army had instilled in him. Adam knew that in dire times, he could flip open one of his soldiering handbooks and it would instruct him as to the proper methodology for running face first into a bullet.

Adam's clothes were a patchwork of hidden pouches, concealed by the camouflage distraction of the tiny squares painted over the surface of his Army Combat Uniform. This strategy helped to keep drifting hands from finding moorage on the bodies of soldiers.

Adam squeezed his eyes closed and divided the molecules in his body, the half of him that was man was left behind, a lump of coal. The other half was cosmic peanut-butter drifting away. Adam floated for a moment, creamy and good, at peace with the universe. He was the same stuff space was, vast and everywhere. He hovered out there in the vacuum of noiseless nowhere, ducking comets and skirting alien empires. He painted pictures. He dabbled in watery colors, sweeping purple space dust into icy frescos upon the walls of night. He illustrated hope in the darkest places, filling the void of black holes with simmering hues and opening wide stretches of nothingness to the possibility of color.

Adam wandered three dimensions of infinity, his soul struggling to find beauty in the wake of Colonel Carrington’s untimely disappearance. Trying to make sense of an existence in which Lieutenant Colonel Fritter could be unleashed on the naïve and unsuspecting. Where such a villainous creature might call itself a man, and walk with men on two legs, all the while plotting against men to sate its monstrous lusts.

“You are,” livestock, “in my eyes,” slaughter-house bound, “heros.” Colonel Fritter had said. “Today, I ask each of you to look inside of yourselves,” and see meat, “to lead the charge into,” the bloody grinder, “tomorrow, and spearhead change so that you might come out,” sausages, “victorious,” and edible, basking, “under the heat of this desert sun. These are grave times, but I know that you will satisfy my demand for obedience and” blood “sacrifice in the face of these,” gluttonous urges, these “challenging circumstances that call into question the strength your mettle as well as the fate of the whole” ruse, “of,” my “humanity. I have full confidence that you will conduct yourselves,” with no regard for your own lives, “in accordance with the systematic guidelines laid out in,” the lies spoken around the stilted words of, “my command philosophy.”

Colonel Fritter had closed his speech, picking the scraps of Colonel Carrington’s legacy from his teeth. He had devoured the best parts, and left those pieces he longed to forget to rot away on the muddy slopes of the river Tigris. Adam had sat quietly in the crowd pressed within the stifling auditorium. Flies had twirled in the thick atmosphere of the room, gathering on the walls and on the backs of chairs, discussing designs to carve up the bodies of doomed American soldiers. Colonel Fritter spoke, barely masking his contempt for the audience. Betraying their disguise, the feral gold almonds of his eyes seemed to muse endlessly on the abandoned scraps of hope and dignity they had seen fit to leave wither in the slender reeds, to be picked apart by scavenging flies and dogs.

The moon, glazed and balanced precariously upon the growing hedge of starry darkness sprouting up around the Earth, it shone down on the filthy white marble underneath Adam’s feet. He wisped slowly back and forth through the cosmos, lost in thoughts, an eternity away from the fearful circumstances of war.

Also, since you've gotten this far, I'm going to reveal that the book is now titled.

A Lively New Haunt for Crafty Old Jackals
Private Adam Blue's Last Distilment from a Long and Inward Discourse

Also, Monica (who blogs at Garden State of Euphoria) has been kind enough to work on a book jacket for me. She had to make one for a school project, and by doing the design for my book she gets double the mileage out of her work. More than double once I move to the publication process. Everyone wins.

Her working on the book cover is actually what finally forced me to nail down a title for the project. All in all, I'd say it's coming together nicely.

One concern I have is that when I move to publish the book that the publisher will demand a title change or a different cover. If it comes down to that then I'll self publish, and still have a rocking looking book. It's a win-win for me.

Monica tells me that the colors are a bit off in the version I have for some reason, but I'm going to post this until she sends me a screenshot of the actual colors. You'll get the idea, just know that the yellow should be greenish. All the reviews and stuff are ripped from other books for the purpose of her project. Obviously, I don't look like G.I. Joe. So yeah, the colors are wrong and there are some place holders in there, but feel free to click and marvel at Monica's awesome work...

A Foolish Poll, Given Serious Consideration

2008-04-01T20:26:00.010-04:00

Earlier today, John Hawkins of Right Wing News posted a sort of light hearted April Fools' Day poll about being trapped with celebrities on a desert island. In the poll, you were responsible for choosing a leader for your group, from the assembled lot of celebrities.

With a little help from Google and Wikipedia, I've given this some serious consideration.

So, let's start off by listing our options...

Paris Hilton
Tom Green
Britney Spears
Andy Dick
Rosie O'Donnell
Michael Jackson
Carrot Top
Amy Winehouse
Courtney Love
Gary Busey

I'll be the first to tell you, this is not my ideal list of pop-culture personalities, but not all is lost. I think we've got a few closet survivors in the crowd.

So, with the magic of the internet at our fingertips, I'm going to list the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate, and then rate them in terms of survivability in the wild and then choose my leader.

Paris Hilton- The 27 year old socialite looks like dead weight at first, but she has some surprising virtues. There's the obvious fact that she's one of the younger members of our group, making her more vigorous, flexible, and resilient than her older companions. Consider also her role on the reality television show The Simple Life, where she and her BFFTM (Best Friend for the Moment) Nicole Richie were thrust onto an Arkansas farm to participate in the workings of a lower class agricultural family. She has youth, and at least some experience performing manual labor in a non-urban environment. While not necessarily suited to making survival decisions, I suspect that under proper advisement, Paris could be a survival candidate.

Tom Green- Now here's an interesting cat. The 36 year old Canadian comic/actor has a lot more potential than one might think. First off, he's been known to put all sorts of things in his mouth, things like udders. In a civilized locale, that's something of a faux pas, but when you're in the wild trying to survive, he who can stomach the most grubs and crickets may just have the longest to live. He's not a party animal, having recently tried to take his career in a more serious and relatively family-oriented direction and he has demonstrated some business savvy with his assets. That said, he seems to have a fairly level head. His background in radio, might make him useful for making basic repairs to and operating any sort of commercial radio equipment that the group might salvage from the wreck or find washed up on shore. I think Tom's got a high degree of survivability.

Britney Spears- The only real strength 26 year old Britney has is that she competed as a gymnast prior to hitting it big in the music industry. Unfortunately, she's out of her damn mind. With her string of mental breakdowns, I wouldn't trust Britney with a pocket knife, more or less the lives of other people. She's likely to demoralize the group, and will be left more or less incapacitated in the early days of the ordeal if she is currently hooked on any hard drugs. Detox is a bitch, or so I hear.

Andy Dick- 42 year old Andy's history of drug use and unwanted groping of celebrities really doesn't do us much good in a survival situation. He once got his ass kicked by Jon Lovitz. Good for Jon, I guess. Dick's work with PETA could give him a knowledge of local fauna, making him a potentially valuable resource for identifying edible game, helping the group to avoid poisonous critters. Even so, given his penchant for recklessness, it's unlikely that Andy would be key to the group's survival.

Rosie O'Donnell- At the age of 46, Rosie is one of the older members of the group, she's in poor physical condition, and her disdain for guns could lead to the sabotage of group of efforts. Her large frame, however, does afford her some leniency in terms of dietary requirements. She could certainly go longer without food than many of the slighter members of group. (Michael Jackson, Andy Dick, Paris Hilton, et al...)

Michael Jackson- The 49 year old King of Pop, is probably the least suited for survival in mainstream civilization, more or less, a desert island. Having been in show business from childhood on, Michael lacks any real world survival skills. In the off chance that natives are encountered on the desert island, Michael Jackson's insane international market penetration and popularity could save the group from cannibalization. (Though I should note that cannibal cultures are rare. Also, that there is likely little left of Michael Jackson that is actually edible.)

Carrot Top- The 43 year old comedian is something of a red herring (enjoy the pun, they're few and far between around here), since everyone remembers him as the wimpy frazzle headed standup comic who grew famous for his odd appearance and his unconventional use of prop based comedy. Even his fellow comedians think he's a pussy. I caught a Pauly Shore show in 2005 where Pauly thought he could kick Carrot Top's ass in a celebrity boxing match. Pauly Shore is about five-foot five and probably about one-hundred-fifty pounds. Carrot Top on the other hand has swollen over the years into a muscle bound goon. With his background in prop construction, Carrot Top may be the most valuable member of the team, bringing both physical prowess and actual skills to the table. It's pretty sad when this guy is our Professor.

Amy Winehouse- Well, it could be worse, 24 year old Amy Winehouse could be Britney Spears. Booze, drugs, booze. Useless in a survival situation, but possibly the least irritating gal in the bunch. Who knows, Paris could be cooler?

Courtney Love- She's the girl we use to console Britney. But hey, she knows how to use a shotgun. RIP Kurt Cobain. She may not have any skills, and she might be drugged out of her mind, but she's probably the most cutthroat bitch on the island.

Gary Busey- Here's our wild card. He's the only man on the island who is clearly insane. He's had some pretty harsh things to say about Britney and Paris in the past, so there's a good chance he might just go on a killing spree. He could really go any which way. Someone might have to take him down.

Here's how I order them in terms of survivability...

Carrot Top
Tom Green
Rosie O'Donnell
Courtney Love
Paris Hilton
Gary Busey
Andy Dick
Amy Winehouse
Britney Spears
Michael Jackson

And I choose...
Tom Green to be the group leader. He's a fairly level headed survivor capable of performing disgusting acts of self-preservation. Tom could spur the whole group to survive with his willingness to lead by example. An alliance between Tom and Carrot-Top could potentially save the whole lot of them... well, the ones that don't kill themselves... and the ones that don't get gutted in their sleep by Gary Busey or Courtney Love. She might just stop at disfiguring her rivals, and possibly spitting on their marred faces.

That's the best I can do with what I was left to work with. I wouldn't mind being on that island, I've seen enough Discovery Channel to know what to do. Thanks Bear Grylls.

Adam Blue Project Update: Second Draft Progress and Excerpts Day 13

2008-03-30T13:35:00.001-04:00

Coming on the heels of sleeping all day, (recovery from a late night in Philly) I've finally gotten around to posting new samples from the recently completed 6th Chapter of Adam Blue. The project reached a milestone recently, 50 pages of completed second draft material. I'm not sure how many pages are left to do, but the recent momentum has been a huge push in the right direction. Right now, I'm kind of hoping that I can knock out at least ten pages of material a week. Even at that rate, which is admittedly slow, I can have this book done in a few months and ready for peer review and manuscript distribution. I finished 30 pages of material in the past two weeks, so I'm on track again I think. I'm really excited about the project, and I have good feelings.

This one was kind of interesting, a lot of the original material slated for this chapter was cut in favor of new text. So here's the chapter tracker summary...

Peter Potter Takes a Leak

Consisting of content from Adam Blue Gets Dirty, Private Adam Blue Shits His Pants and mostly new text, this chapter details the search of the helicopter crash site. Also the ride towards the FOB.

Pretty bland, in planning, this chapter ended up taking up roughly 14 pages of actual text, including a lot of dialog. So, it's sort of a proud addition in the sense that I wanted longer, meatier chapters. The actual writing itself is pretty decent too, I think. One thing I've noticed with Adam Blue is that a lot of my dialog tends to feel forced and meaningless. I don't feel bad about that at all, part of the cause is that all my characters are pretty two-dimensional. Just about every character in the story, with the exception of Adam, the sun, and the moon, are arch typical characters designed to represent a certain demographic. Not all those characters are going to blossom vocally. I can accept that. Also, my dialog is a little rusty, I tend to favor monologues when I write. The back and forth of conversation, is at times, a very unnatural and time consuming way to express a secondary character's thoughts and feelings. I think that is part of the reason that I introduced Colonel Fretter in this chapter with such a long soliloquy/aside with Adam. It gave me a chance to establish him as a villain from the onset, kind of cartoonishly even, since his evils mostly reside in Adam's head.

Anyway. Here is the sample...

Chapter 7
Evening, Day 13: Peter Potter Takes a Leak
Adam was grimy from his chest to the toes of his boots with milk chocolate muck. Sweat ran in rivulets down his body, creeping through the fabric of his uniform and ballistic vest to mix with the waste from the irrigation ditches he had been skulking through. The river rose ominously before him in the fading glow of day, brown slowly fading to black as night’s grip tightened on the recovery site.

“I reckon not.” Cowboy agreed.

“You need to turn the truck this way, Blue.” Specialist Peter Potter yelled from the fringe of the palm grove. Adam ignored him as he plucked a cigarette from the soggy hard pack. He dragged his thumb over the roller of the lighter, sparking a flame. He brought the burning lick of fire to the tip of the cigarette mashed between his lips. He shot out the first mouthful of fumes, ejecting smoke and spent lighter fluid. Adam filled himself with smoke as he rested his side against the steel plate bolted to the door of the truck.

Peter Potter ambled with a practiced nonchalance towards Adam. He held his fore and middle fingers to his lips, using body language to confer his desire to smoke one of Adam’s cigarettes. Peter’s liberal upbringing had taught him to have a sense of entitlement to things which inherently belonged to others. The warmth of Adam’s heart had taught him to give things, which were inherently his, to those in need. In that regard, Adam and Peter got along swimmingly.

Adam tossed the filthy pack of Camels to Peter.

Peter pilfered a single length of tobacco, filter and paper. He brought it to his lips and struck his lighter to life. He took a long drag, closing his eyes behind the fashionable frames of his designer glasses. Peter handed the pack back to Adam as he stepped closer.

“Can we get the lights over there? We need to be able to see where we’re wasting our time.” Peter said. The conspiracy in his voice indicated that his vocalization of dissatisfaction was meant only to fill the short space between his face and Adam’s face.

Peter’s rampant disinterest in the mission was fueled by a life long and passionate apathy towards goal oriented activities. Peter was the product of a changing America. The country had become, over time, a place where those who could, often chose not to do. A place where those who wish they could, but couldn’t, believed they could anyway. The American dream had come to foster an environment where the stupid and talent-less aspired to greatness, and the facile minority aspired to nothing more than a buzzing social commentary rooted in snobbish criticism. Peter was a lazy intellectual, with a haughty bone to pick with the institution that paid his bills. The government of the United States and every brain-dead soul that worked for it were in the cross-hairs of Peter’s jibes. He also had larger and less immediate issues with God. God didn’t seem to care.

“Fuck it.” Adam said, trying to sound casual. He had bigger worries than the bellies of the muddy irrigation ditches. The bellies he was worried about had eyes, fangs and scales wrapped around them. For the sake of everyone, Adam would suffer his comrades to fumble in the dark.

“Yeah, fuck it. I think we’re getting out of here soon, anyway.” Peter replied, shooting a jet of smoke from his nostrils. “This is bullshit, they had crew out here a half-hour after the crash and they didn’t find a damn thing. They wait twelve hours, bring us out and have us spend the whole day combing wreckage. Fucking retards.”

“Fucking retards.” Adam agreed half-heartedly.

“Fuckin’ ungracious little pistol startin’ cocksuckin’ polecat, got no respect for the dead. I got a high mind to track down his pa and set him straight for the wrongness he done raisin’ that boy. I’d set him straight by bustin’ his ribs, for one.” Cowboy spat.

The moon plugged her ears and held her breath. Foul language and violence had a way of taking a toll on her, and she wanted nothing to do with any of it. She watched Cowboy shadowbox the sprawling emptiness of space, cussing and spitting. His spurs spun brightly as he stomped and growled. The moon waxed bright red as her cheeks bulged into the night. When he reached for his flask, she knew it was safe to surrender her guard, so she did.

Cowboy tipped whiskey into his mouth, gulping twice before relaxing the bottle. He wiped his mustache clean with the sleeve of his checked shirt, and turned his ornery eyes on Peter who, for his part, was still being a prick.

“I mean, who the hell cares?” Peter asked. He brushed the smoldering end of the cigarette against the side of the humvee, leaving an ashen streak across the armor. Peter cupped his mouth in his hand and pulled it down across his chin, his fingers dragging the sweaty sheen that had gathered around his lips away from his face.

“I’m gonna go piss.” Peter said as he walked off. He trucked down the river bank towards a stand of reeds outside of the prying eyes of the humvee headlights. His M4 assault rifle bounced against his legs as it waggled in its sling.

Puertasmo

2008-03-23T20:33:00.001-04:00

In order to prove what total asshats we are, the friends of Gene Paul Puerta have made a website for him...

Puertasmo

You can find some of my "in-character" writing there pretending to be Gene. I write as Mr. Puertastic. He can post now too, but we only gave him limited power. He can't edit or alter anyone's work but his own.

That's right, we gave him a website that we use to make fun of him. We're the best friends a guy could ever have.

That said, I am going to talk a little bit about Gene in this post.

Gene's definitely one of the most loyal and proactive people I've met in my life. As friends go, he's the kind of guy that will go out of his way to not only maintain a friendship, but to help a friend. He impresses me in a lot of ways. I think, because he's got a lot of qualities I lack, like dedication and motivation. He's one of those people that you make friends with and regret it for the rest of your natural life... because he's going nowhere.

He's kind of spasmodic, and almost always a little bitch.

That's his charm.

So, go to his new site, show him some love. He needs it while he's alone and away at college without his boys.

Adam Blue Project Update: Motivation, Strategy, Update and Excerpts from Day 12

2008-03-18T19:20:00.000-04:00

Motivation

Well, it's strange. I think I kind of missed the point of this blog, which was half about working on the Adam Blue project to begin with. Yesterday, I posted an entry after finishing the most productive day of work yet and it spurred me onward to eek out some more writing today.

I think I owe a lot of my early successes to the fact that I received constant motivation from my readers. Those pats on the back went a long way towards making me feel like I wasn't working in a vacuum. During the seven months or so (math is stupid) I was working on the project in Iraq I got a ton of positive feedback from the readers of my MySpace blog. (Several of whom will receive free copies of the final product in appreciation of that much needed help.)

Last week, Monica (Garden State of Euphoria) asked me a fairly poignant question about what it takes to actually put words down...

How do you deal with a little ailment that goes something like 'I keep writing in my head but can't seem to sit still long enough to type it up and hit submit'?

At first, I didn't really have a good answer. The only time I'd made any significant progress writing was in Iraq when I was posting the Adam Blue stories as I completed them. I realized that the reason I was having such a problem editing and adding to the existing content was because I was working in a vacuum. I had pulled all my Adam Blue material off of my MySpace blog, and swore not to publish any more of it until it came out in an actual no shit book. A great plan, except that I apparently suck at self-motivating. I got myself into a bind of sorts because I couldn't just publish the book wholesale on my blog in its final form, and I couldn't finish it without sharing my work in progress. I don't really have a local writer circle to bounce my ideas off of, and I can't spread material I want to be paid for across the internet... so I need some sort of compromise.

That compromise is this: as I complete material for the book I'll be posting excerpts on the blog and write about the process I used to complete that particular section. Writing the second draft has been a lot more complicated, I find myself checking references for dates, events, factoids and that sort of thing. That gives me a little bit more to talk about here in the blog to make up for the fact that I won't be posting whole chapters here.

Update

After a trip to the bookstore and a lot of talk about writing the other day, I hit the ground motivated. I worked for about thirteen hours yesterday, and five hours today (on and off) to iron out two chapters of the book. Here are the write-ups from my chapter tracker...

Adam Blue and the Giant
Consisting of Adam Blue and the Sticky Situation, Adam Blue Doesn’t Find Jesus and new text, this chapter combines two day time events into a single day. This chapter focuses more on the sun and further expands Horus Alcott in a mostly negative way.

Mack Loses a Tooth
Consisting of all new text, this chapter details Mack’s helicopter ride and the subsequent crash in the desert, and his escape from the scene. The Sun speaks, but makes no direct communication with Mack. Mack’s religious beliefs may play a large role.

The green highlight is a good thing, in my tracker the green highlight means that the text is down in its second draft format and is still open for editing. Yellow means it is partially written or only contains first draft text, and red means it hasn't been written at all. Once I am absolutely satisfied with a chapter, I clear all highlights. It takes a lot for me to be absolutely satisfied with a chapter, I just cleared the first chapter yesterday and it had been green for over a month and a half. I was struggling over a single sentence.

Anyway, Adam Blue and the Giant was the longest chapter I've completed to date. I combined two daytime events into a single string of events. I did this for two reasons. One, Adam Blue and the Sticky Situation did a good job of giving a strong introduction to the sun, but it was lacking in meat when it came to length and actually developing the story. Adam Blue Doesn't Find Jesus had some major flaws, both stylistically and in terms of character personality. It did however plant the seed of Mack's plot-line, which ended up emerging with some fairly strong solo chapters much later in the project. Adam Blue Doesn't Find Jesus had some strong content in terms of imagery, but it needed a lot of work to fit in with my second draft vision of the book. By linking the two chapters I cut down on the amount of jumping around that the reader has to put up with by forming a single linear series of events, and I made a more presentable looking chapter in terms of length and consistency.

So here is an excerpt from the newly minted Adam Blue and the Giant...

Morning, Day 12: Adam Blue and the Giant
Adam slipped out, turning quickly to curse the sun.

"Fucking bastard!" He said. His voice was crisp and low.

The sun held its silence. It pretended not to hear Adam, as if it had some other solar system somewhere else it was keeping warm. The sun acted like it was stepping out on its satellites to visit other orbital bodies in some other galaxy. The sun wanted Adam to believe it was living a double life. Adam knew the sun wasn't doing anything that exciting.

"What did you say, Blue?" Alcott asked.

Alcott made a point of only hearing things that confirmed his presumptions about the nature of existence. In his opinion, he Ulysses S. Alcott was not a fucking bastard. In truth, he considered himself to be a role model and a leader. He wasn’t. He had a fairly good heart and a bad brain filled with bile, hatred and the ignorant preaching of those who came before him.

Adam spoke truthfully, "I said fucking bastard, because he is."

The fat toad's eyes exploded open in confusion, they meandered back and forth in a clumsy dance. When performed by a more gracefully featured person this expression might have been called darting. His hand awkwardly scoured the desk for a forgotten can of soda. He clutched the aluminum vessel and brought it to his chapped lips, and then he took a long sip from the day old cola. He cleared his throat, emptying stale tobacco juices, snot and dust into his mouth. He spat back into the can and looked at Adam.

"What? Who is?" Alcott asked.

Adam spoke falsely, "My father."

Adam’s father was, incidentally, not a fucking bastard at all, but was in fact a fairly likeable guy. Adam's dad went to work every day, he wore a tie, suspenders and leather shoes. No one had ever had a problem with Adam's dad, ever. He was meek and reliable man.

"Well, we can handle that on your personal time. There's work to be done Blue… but if you need to talk about it, I think I know a thing or two about bad parents." Alcott said, with a brown smile.

Alcott knew more than a thing or two, having been a poor father to five children of his own. Given ample time and motivation, his ex-wife could attest to his failings as a father and as a husband. These were the traits he’d inherited from his own Army father, who had inherited them from his Army father, and so on through the twisted branches of his overpopulated and miserable family tree.

"Roger, Sergeant." Adam said with just enough feigned excitement to not be labeled what some people in his profession would call a ‘shit-bag.’

In the Army, a shit-bag was the worst kind of person, they were a boneless bag of skin filled with human waste: useless brains, broken hearts, damaged kidneys, and dying livers. Almost every single person Adam had ever met in the Army was a shit-bag in at least some capacity. It was a natural result of doing the job. Sergeant Alcott was the biggest shit-bag of all, having done the job since before Adam was born. He suffered from all of the tell-tale ailments brought on by shit-baggery.

I ended up completely pulling the opening of Mack's plot-line from the last chapter in order to give it a bit more attention. Since I already had later chapters exclusively featuring Mack on his own, I thought I would run his story parallel to Adam's in separate chapters from the start of the book. This chapter proved to be one of the most difficult I had to write. I'm not very good with action sequences and this chapter called for a helicopter crash. Have I mentioned that I've never been in a helicopter crash? Thankfully, in this day and age we have YouTube to come to the rescue. A simple search for helicopter crashes yielded plenty of fodder to draw from. The following videos were particularly helpful...

So, let's see how I did. Here's an excerpt from a chapter comprised of all new material, Mack Loses a Tooth...

Afternoon, Day 12: Mack Loses a Tooth
The pilot screamed into his headset, and the black hawk lurched downward. The aircraft heaved riotously, rocked by an explosion. Flares fired from the rear port side of the craft, moments too late to deter the attack. The wounded howl of the rotors was peppered with the clangor of flying debris, terrified screams filled the black hawk as it spun wildly out of control.

Mack tilted his head back and closed his eyes as the torque of the engines jerked the helicopter into a spiraling descent. The noise of rockets pierced the uproar of the crashing bird. Their noses tore through the atmosphere leaving a ripple of distorted fury in their wake as they shot towards the two other helicopters in the chalk. Hugo tensed beside him, screaming, terrified.

“Oh shit, oh shit, holy shit!” Hugo chanted.

“We’ll be okay, if we all do it the same.” Mack stated, his eyes still pressed closed as he leaned as far forward as his safety belts would allow. He slid his hands behind his neck. His mind wandered to the tornado drills of his childhood. The siren wailing as the teachers ushered all the students into the hallway. He remembered crouching with the top of his head to the wall and his hands bracing his spine at the base of his skull. The smell of floor wax and forty-year old grass stains on his knees overpowered the acrid smoke from the shattered tail rotor. The slick smell of human feces rising from the Tigris disappeared. The four strapped harnesses wrapped around his body were the reassuring liver-spotted hands of Mrs. McGillis letting him know he was doing just fine, just dandy. He could remember the shaking of her stiff arthritic fingers scratching out the principles of tornado safety on the blackboard.

“Everyone do it the same.” She said, her graying red bun of hair facing the class.

The long sleeve of her dress sagged down to her elbow, the bones of her forearm visibly rubbing together beneath her pale skin. Mack remembered not knowing what a widow was. It was some sort of nervous condition afflicting Mrs. McGillis, those were things children whispered, things they repeated. How could he have known that her husband had died, how could he have known that anyone could die? The tragic fate of sea monkeys provided little meaningful education in regards to matters of life and death. If nothing else, flushing the briny bowls of water down the toilet made him even less cognizant as a child of the divide separating what is from what is no longer.

The black hawk dipped suddenly to the side, mowing down the tops of the palm trees with its blades. The airfoils made quick work of the upper fronds, and dug effortlessly into their narrow boles. Trees cracked as the helicopter sawed through the grove, tipping this way and that. Wet chunks of vegetation flew into the air, and the nose assumed a downward profile as it smashed into the hard dirt riverbank. The lift of the tattered airfoils and the momentum of the crash spun the aircraft on its nose, balancing briefly as the rotors shattered, and then it crashed into the water on its side. The helicopter twirled twice on its side in the mud before coming to a standstill in the slick brown waters. The river rushed in through the open sides, viscous and dark.

“Walk, don’t run, out of the classroom.” Mrs. McGillis continued.

Mack opened his eyes, dangling sideways from his seat, blood pouring from his mouth and nose. Hugo lay limp beside him, his face bobbing in the surface of the water. Mack reached down, grabbing the front lip of his helmet and he pulled Hugo’s battered face out of the water.

“We’ll be okay, if we all do it the same.” Mrs. McGillis said.

Hugo’s eyelids burst open, his left eye was large and black, the pupil exploding over the retreating silver of the iris. He coughed blood and silt from the river, black and slimy down the side of his face.

“I’m s-sorry I called you an-an-an asshole.” Hugo managed to say.

“What?” Mack asked.

Hugo expired, feeling no reason to further elaborate.

Hope you enjoyed my new strategy. It helps me to share my work, and I'd appreciate any feedback, tips or questions you might have.

Also, I think more people should see the picture posted on Monica's blog...

And thus, I've justified my favorite tag.

Adam Blue Project Update: Second Draft Progress and Strategy

2008-03-16T20:22:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I've been diddling around with the second draft of Adam Blue for a while. Due to a rampant case of laziness I haven't really accomplished much in the way of making my wildest dreams come true. However, there has been some progress. I've been applying a bit of design savvy gleaned from working on Rogue Dao Studios' Purgatorio to keep track of the general structure of the book. For example, I now have, for the sake of consistency and reference, a chapter tracker.

Before I start working on a chapter, I review the material I produced in Baghdad, decide which elements to add, and then write a short blurb of the projected contents of each chapter. So, the first two chapters look something like this in my notes...

Day 1: Adam Blue and the Eyes of the Cosmos
Consisting of Adam Blue’s Brain Goes to Baghdad and additional text, this chapter introduces Adam, Cowboy, the Moon and Alcott. Takes place at the Baghdad International Airport.

Day 2: Adam Blue and the Arrival
Consisting of all new text, this chapter introduces Mack. It takes place on the Chinook in the skies of Baghdad and in the formation area by the landing zone. Mack makes a speech to the Brigade.

I've also begun numbering the chapters by the day on which they occur in the story instead of simply numbering them sequentially. This helps to explain the irregularity of activities occurring within the story. When the reader moves from Day 2 to Day 8 they don't expect the new chapter to pick up exactly where the previous one left off. This is consistent with the vignette style chapters I wrote in Iraq, and should help alleviate some reader confusion regarding the events of the story.

I'm working on interjecting plot characters into earlier chapters, for example in the original draft Sergeant Alcott wasn't introduced until the sixth chapter, and Colonel Mack only gets mentioned once in the sixth chapter. Now I've introduced Alcott briefly in the first chapter, and given Mack an immediate role in the second chapter. In the first draft I created characters as needed to fill certain archetypes and roles in specific chapters, and in some cases these characters, like Peter Potter, ended up being fairly prominent in the following chapters. So, I'm trying to structure the book a bit less haphazardly. After all, with all the oddness of the content, I feel I owe it to the reader to at least structure the book sensibly.

Here's a revised second draft version of my first chapter. This chapter was originally published on my MySpace blog somewhere around the middle of my first draft. I had written this one in a notebook and took my time getting around to typing it up. So in the original online publication I had started with Adam Blue and the Sea Monsters which made a decent opening chapter in terms of establishing Adam's character, but did a poor job of opening the plot of the story. Going back with a mind for revision, I placed my original first chapter Adam Blue's Brain Goes to Baghdad at its rightful place, added some new text (including a stronger opening line), and injected additional plot characters and concepts. Thus, I ended up with my new opening chapter: Adam Blue and the Eyes of the Cosmos, let me know what you think...

Day 1: Adam Blue and the Eyes of the Cosmos

The universe flung itself to and fro, dramatically slinging its bits and pieces against each other. No one really cared enough to notice. The petty rustling of mankind had drawn the eyes of the cosmos to a splintered desert nation. The icy fingers of death were snapping a catchy tune and humanity was stomping and clapping in time with every ounce of enthusiasm it could muster.

The airstrip used by the Coalition Forces in Baghdad sprawled into the desolate quiet of the Iraqi night. Private Adam Blue stood airsick and stupid in the rough gravel pit on the east side of the tarmac. The far off lights of the Baghdad International Airport hung dully in the mottled black air like tallow candles creeping beneath the whispers of the full orange moon.

“Adam, take out your earplugs.” The moon mouthed.

He tugged at the plugs and the silence was vanquished by a brilliant burst of sound and experience. Adam placed the tiny yellow buds into an empty grenade pouch. The shuddering of black hawk helicopters washed over him; their mighty rotor blades beat angrily against the dome of the sky. Suddenly Adam could hear everything: voices, chewing gum popping, an enthusiastic breeze whistling through the slick barrels of machine guns, and he could hear the faint crackling of distant bamboo chutes. Somewhere far away, there were pandas chewing contentedly as they conspired not to fuck. Elsewhere, there were a billion Chinese laughing at a dispirited American zookeeper who had grown weary of the lack of romance in his professional life.

Adam's brain was a nest of glistening madness, a lump of tissue riddled with pulsating veins and some fairly cockamamie ideas about the universe. Amongst them, the idea that things which were, were in fact not, and things that were in fact not, were. Over the years he’d learned to hide the fact that he was, for all intents and purposes, completely bat-shit insane.

Cowboy loomed above Adam. The old salt tipped back a shot of whiskey and wiped his whiskers clean. He tilted eastward on his dusty leather boots and let out a long hoot.

“Would you listen to them? Oooeee!” He sang in his western drawl.

“Pandas! Them bastards think they’re so clever! They’re hidin’ their evil ways behind fuzzy faces. Like we’re gonna forget what they are.” His crooning voice halted, and his lips wrapped into a sneer.

“Commie bastards.” He snarled. Cowboy was stuck in the 50’s. In his opinion, pandas represented everything wrong with Sino-American relations.

Adam's brain was a soggy clump of crazy snapping off millions of electrical impulses at the speed of light. 182,282 miles per second. Incidentally, that was also the speed at which teeth sparkled. Adam's brain couldn't slow down, it twitched and tangled with every breath, it spun strong circles through loopholes in outer-space when stimulated. Cowboy stumbled through those hoops and curlicues. His breath wreaked of booze, his tongue stumbled over slurred advice. His grizzled face was all pins and needles and his chin quivered with lack of sensation; he was an alcoholic. No one knew, but Adam and the moon.

“Hey, darlin’.” Cowboy called out, looking affectionately upon the blushing pock-marked face of the moon. He tipped his hat backward, his feet creeping slowly out from underneath him until he was forced to grab the massive seal of his belt buckle for balance. He hiked his dungarees up, pulling himself forward and grinning sloppily.

The moon hid her abashment behind a veil of slow moving clouds. She had self-esteem issues, a result of her ruddy complexion and yo-yoing weight.

“Hello.” She peeped, hidden behind the gauze of condensed air moisture. Still, the embarrassed glow of her face hedged the fringes of the clouds, painting them a timid custard haze.

The pair fell into an awkward silence, as they always did when words failed between them. Cowboy quickly changed course, turning towards Adam.

“You ready for this, buckaroo?” He asked.

“I don’t think so.” Adam replied.

“Well, you just do your best and things’ll fall into place. Usually do.” Cowboy said, the whiskey in his blood lending backbone to his air of rugged confidence.

“You’re a good kid. Ain’t nothin’ bad gonna happen to you.” He said, nodding with a wobbly reassurance.

“I hope not.” Adam said. He couldn’t help but feel that the matter of his life and death was completely out of his hands. That sort of thing was decided by men far away, men with far more stake in what Adam was doing than Adam himself.

“Blue!” A voice belonging to Sergeant First Class Ulysseus S. Alcott bellowed. “Pick it up! We’re leaving!”

Adam scrambled to gather his gear. His unit wouldn’t be going anywhere for hours, and everyone knew it. Everyone that is, except Sergeant Alcott, whose complete faith in the Army had filled him with the delusion that somewhere there was someone who knew what the hell was going on. There wasn’t.

Due South?

2008-03-12T21:51:00.000-04:00

You may be looking at my new swim buddy.

I was reading the May 2007 edition of Men's Journal today in the bathroom. I flipped through page after page of manly endeavors, adventures and boasts. A small blurb caught my attention. Amidst the para-gliding, treacherous nighttime skiing, and mountain climbing, I found something brilliant. Antarctica. I'm not talking about whale watching trips or just flying in to check it out. I'm talking about, no bullshit, taking up residence on the southern most continent.

When it comes to travel, I'm no tourist; I want to live and breath the places I go. So when I got to the italicized text after the blurb about popping in and doing shots at the bottom of the Earth, my heart raced. Not just because I was answering nature's call, but because I think I heard a calling of a different sort. In that text there was a link to Raytheon's Polar Services website with the promise of work opportunities.

I'm no stranger to Raytheon, I ran into a few of their contractors in Iraq, but I had no idea they were at the South Pole too. Apparently, they operate the facilities down there and they hire employees through seasonal contracts in a variety of support fields. Not everyone working at a research station is a scientist. They've got mail clerks, couriers, communication technicians, carpenters, plumbers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers and so forth. There are four to six month contracts available during the Antarctic summer, and eight to ten month contracts available for the winter.

Now, I've learned one thing about companies that fill complicated and unusual government contracts; they pay top-dollar. There's no environment more extreme than the polar ice caps, so I imagine that the pay is probably none too shabby. Even if it paid crap, which I find hard to believe, I'd probably come back with 97% of the money I made while I was there... since, to my knowledge, they don't have any malls or fancy restaurants on the South Pole.

So, here's my plan. I've applied to go to college this fall. I'll go to school for three semesters, then I'll take a year off and work ten months in Antarctica doing one of several jobs I'm qualified to do. Then I'll come back with enough money to pay for the remainder of my college. I should be pretty close to graduation by then, given the number of credits I have from DLI. Who knows? I may be able to finagle some college credit out of the whole thing. After all, it is a scientific research station. Not to mention that they boast scientific lectures and all sorts of educational garbage. Think of it as the most profitable and exotic study abroad program ever.

If Iraq taught me anything, it's that I write best when I'm in an environment without distractions. You don't get more distraction-free than Antarctica. It's just you, the birds, the nerds and the snow. There's a book down there, it's waiting for me.

Apparently they'll also let me ski. That's a plus.

So hopefully, two years from now I'll be living here...

The Truth Is...

2008-02-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

I'm a closet liberal.

In the world I live in, it's perfectly acceptable to slay babies not yet free of their mothers' wombs. It's casually accepted that two people of the same gender could lead productive lives in a nurturing relationship without destroying the fabric of the American way of life and opening a weird Pandora's sex-box filled with bestiality, pedophilia and unisex bathrooms in church.

I have another confession...

I'm a closet conservative.

I have no sympathy for murderers, rapists, and fiscally irresponsible suburbanites who live beyond their means. I think government welfare, generally speaking, is a crock of shit.

I can also be a raging hypocrite. It seems to work for everyone else, so I'm on board with that too.

Here are some problems with our government, listed in no particular order.

______________________________________________________________________________________

1) We have two political parties whose entire purpose is to get their politicians into positions of power in order to push a specific agenda. These agendas are basically just strategies for solving the problems in our country. We have two parties, with two legitimate strategies, and only one country. What's that mean? Compromise. Both parties spend all their time squabbling over the middle-ground, and in the end solve nothing.

2) We elect our politicians based on some fairly absurd issues. My favorite is abortion. Not just because it's fun to make jokes about, (and I've made my fair share) but it's completely one-hundred-billion percent irrelevant to the future of our country. What drives America is its economy. If some dead Eurotrash impressionist like, say... Van Gogh, were to paint a portrait of the scope of American success there wouldn't be one dead fucking baby in sight, but there'd be plenty of greenbacks. And probably a few ten-inch cocks. (I'm looking at you President Washington, you wooden-toothed rapscallion.)

3) The Primaries have nothing to do with democracy. I shouldn't need to go into any further depth than that. If you know anything about the Primaries then you agree with me. If you know nothing about the Primaries then it doesn't really matter whether you agree with me or not because you have no idea what I'm talking about. Look it up, and think about. More thought has gone into the formation of fantasy baseball leagues than the democratization of American political Primaries.

4) There's an old saying when it comes to awesome cars...

"Drive it like you stole it!"

It's the sort of thing your asshole friend says to you the first time you let him ride shotgun in your brand new, not a piece of shit, car. That's how our politicians drive our government, like they stole it. They're driving our metaphorical car, and we're standing in our metaphorical driveways with our hands in our hair whispering "Holy metafuckingphorical shit. Stop that." as you watch smoke rise from the spinning tires, hear the engine roar and feel in your chest the car shuddering furiously in place... only the smoke is money and the tires are totally government projects and the engine is media attention and... well, shuddering furiously in place describes both our government and your sweet ride in fairly equal context.

I guess I can summarize that by saying that the government spends money frivolously.

5) In a system of government meant to represent the will of the people, it seems contrary to snap at politicians who "poll watch". Polls are a mathematical assessment of voters' opinions. Why has representing the people been demonized in modern politics? Well, part of the blame can be cast upon our reigning political parties. The idea that the wants and needs of the individual voter are irrelevant has been made true by the influence of political parties. The purity of the parties has been turned into the stuff of legends. Both parties assume a sort of calculated victory since World War II, they stack up pleasing facts in order to claim responsibility for every ounce of good that has come out of the government. By the same token, everything that has been bad... that's been the fault of the opposition. My point is, once again, we have a government with very little interest in actually exercising anything beyond the fanfare and theater of democracy.

______________________________________________________________________________________

I'm going to toss out a brief caveat here: America is essentially a democratic nation, and our votes do count. I know I was a little bit rough, and may have slipped ever so slightly into the dark and fantastic realm of hyperbole. What I'm saying is that our methods of governing are flawed and prone to corruption. Not criminal corruption per se, but a corruption of the spirit of democracy. A corruption of the American expectation that we citizens deserve to have our views represented by our representatives. Represent, it's sort of in the title of our brand of government: Representative Democracy. Sometimes people lose sight of the obvious.

That said, I also believe whole-heartedly that politicians are not evil megalomaniacal con-artists. They do what they have to do to thrive within the system. I like to think that politicians are generally good-hearted people with a passion for making their country a better place to be. Whether you agree with their view of what constitutes a utopia probably determines where you lie in the political spectrum.

I lie on the tracks. Politicians lie on the record.

A Ten Factioid Blogsplosion

2008-01-26T13:18:00.000-05:00

I've somehow managed to avoid doing surveys, for the most part, by not doing them when I get tagged. However, when you get tagged three times in one day... it warrants a response, nay sir, it demands a response. I am taking action. This survey is a dead man. (Note the use of metaphor, very important.)

Here are the rules. I have to list ten facts about myself. Easy? Not the way I do it.

Number One.

I have no idea what a nurse's assistant does. I know what a nurse does. A nurse assists a doctor. Nurses are responsible for administering medication, monitoring the patient, handing scalpels, and so on. They do tons of important stuff. A nurse's assistant? Do they open the medication? Do they wash the scalpel? It seems a bit contrived, like hiring a secretary for your secretary. I know I could wikipedia this, or google it, or ask someone, but I think the topic is more entertaining when cloaked by a veil of ignorance and assumption/presumption. I am nothing if not ignorant and sumptuous.

Number Two.

I once picked a girl up at a gas station. We went to a bar. She turned out to be completely boring. I have never been impressed by the quality of products found at the gas station. I wouldn't buy steak at the gas station, I should know better than to pick up girls there.

Number Three.

I see no problem with comparing women to pieces of meat. This has nothing to do with their gender, and a lot to do with the fact that we're all really just pieces of meat. Some of us are simply more sumptuous. Yum.

Number Four.

I've actually managed to glean three separate bullet points out of this one series of events. That same girl and I went out a few times, but we stopped seeing each other partly because the boredom was stifling. The richest relationship in her life was with her cat. The main reason though is this... I am an atheist. So after she asked me about it and I confirmed, she didn't return my calls. I let it go because watching cable on her couch and discussing her cat was not high on my to-do list. I have been "let go" for my religious views; I have been discriminated against because I bathe in hell-fire. I have an eternity of damnation ahead of me, no reason to make me suffer now.

Number Five.

I secretly worry that we're running out of personality types because of the influence of main stream media. Chuck Klosterman writes about this in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, in the chapter about the Real World. Mr. Klosterman, I'll see your suspicions and raise you a reasonable amount of alarm.

I worry that future pirate movies will be constant rehashes of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow. How sad would that be? Sparrow is an awesome character, brilliant even, but it's been done. We need progress, we need innovation. What's worse, I'm afraid of spillage. What happens when characters in other genres turn into Jack Sparrow? What happens when real life people turn into Jack Sparrow? What happens when Jack Sparrow bags your groceries? Bums a dollar? Files your taxes? Robs you at knife point?

This sort of thing is already happening, you see television homogenizing the country. Regional accents are slowly disappearing. America's role-models are broadcast country wide, world-wide really, and mass media has begun the process of pigeon-holing the population. Red State, Blue State anyone?

Human beings deal in one-dimensional stereotypes as a matter of convenience, it makes war and lynching easier to accept. When you can shed the burden of looking at a person as a multi-faceted being, it makes it easier to not think of them as a human(Like a piece of meat, I'm guilty too). Likewise, it's easier to be understood when you can whittle your own personality down to a known arch-type. When you can be the jock, the geek, the dweeb, the druggie, the prep, the militant, the artist, the queer, the black, the Jew, the upper, the downer, the socialite, the hopeless romantic, the moderately effeminate lumberjack, the musician, the nice guy, the Christian, the Jack Sparrow and so on, it streamlines the social process. You can take your most prominent trait, or feature, and run with it. The real motivation here, I suppose, is to avoid ridicule, or share ridicule with others who've lumped themselves into your group. The jock who plays Dungeons and Dragons isn't a jock who plays Dungeons and Dragons, he's a jock because people respect jocks more, it's more socially desirable to be a jock than a geek. It's easier to be gay because there are other people who are gay. I think the mantra "we're here, we're queer, get used to it." is telling because there is no "I" in queer. There is a gay community, and when moral/religious conservatives level ridicule at the gays they can share the so-called blame.

This could of course lead me back to the idea of racial identity. I'll keep it brief though. Racial profiling happens on two levels. People profile other people, and people profile themselves.

I suppose what I'm saying is that folks should be who they are, and not who they're supposed to be. Jocks should feel free to admit that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was kind of a cool life changing experience, and straight guys should be able to admit that sometimes they like to watch gay porn because the acting is better.

Number Six

As previously mentioned, I am an atheist. I'm not asshole about it though. I would never be so bold as to presume to know the nature of the universe.

What makes me odd as an atheist is that I don't think atheism holds any more weight than any religion. Atheists tend to take a smarter-than-thou attitude when faced with a holier-than-thou situation, but when it comes down to it there's really no plausible argument for anything beyond belief. Atheists like to use science to disprove religion. But what is science, really?

Science is a collection of theories and observations that seek to explain the nature of existence. There are no facts in science, not really, there are some pretty good assumptions, but in an existence filled with infinite possibilities what can we really be certain about?

Most atheists accept science at face value, usually without even understanding how the conclusions were drawn. I can tell you that science says that the earth is several billion years old, but I couldn't prove it myself, and I have no clue how other people came to that conclusion. I believe it's true, and what's that called? Faith.

Regardless of whether you believe in God, unicorns, the tooth fairy, chemistry, or whatever, we're all on fairly equal footing in so-far as explaining the nature of existence. I don't feel that believing in God is any more far-fetched than believing that light travels at a constant speed 35 miles per hour, regardless of posted speed limits, when inside of a Lincoln Towncar with a geriatric behind the wheel. (See how I used a known stereotype to communicate absurdity? See number five again.)

There isn't that big of a difference between people who believe in God and people who don't, the only thing that changes is how you view our shared reality. If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's this... existence is magical.

Number Seven.

Those of you who party with me know that if there's one thing you can count on, it's the fact that I will clog your toilet and rob you of precious rolls of sanitary paper. I am of the mind that if there is one thing on this planet that every human being should be anal about it's the cleanliness of their anus. I wipe until I'm sure that the poop is gone, I will not walk around with a stinky bottom. To that end, baby wipes are a miracle. But why just for babies? Why not me? Why aren't more people wiping their asses with these things? They're like slightly moistened magic.

Think about it. Write a letter to big-ass-wipe and demand satisfaction from your netherly hygiene experience. Walk around clean and refreshed, not stinky and the opposite of refreshed when used as a description of cleanliness.

Try it, that's all I'm saying. It'll save you some time, keep you smelling fresh, and your sphincter will thank you. I was going to make a brown-eye/red-eye joke here, but it was sort of tasteless, so I cut it.

Number Eight.

I had a near death experience on a plane. While on mid-tour leave from Iraq, my flight out of Atlanta suffered technical difficulties. Apparently in mid-air the plane lost power to it's stabilizers. I don't know what stabilizers are, but I'm going to conjecture that they have something to do with stability, and I'm guessing that's sort of important. I'm no expert though, so I could be overreacting. Stabilizers might be the thing that keeps coffee from spilling during rough turbulence. I don't know. I'm not an airplane mechanic, or an aerospace engineer and I couldn't afford to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. I'm clueless. Anyway, I missed out on the whole experience because I was passed out drunk in my seat. I'm told it was quite harrowing.

Number Nine.

The only holiday I really like as an adult is Thanksgiving. I love food, and everybody gets the same thing. I might be a Commie.

I'm not jumping on the universal health-care bandwagon just yet. I've seen what our government can do.

On a lame side note, I don't know why doctors spend their entire careers practicing medicine. When is the big game? When are the Medical Olympics? Can we change that term to performing medicine. Magicians practice tricks and then they perform them. I think doctors could learn a thing or two from those guys. One, practice and then perform. Two, lovely young assistants, and I suppose lovely young assistants for your lovely young assistants. Three, sequins are okay, live a little.

And Ten.

I'm really pretty much done with this survey. I eat my fries with mayo whenever possible. It just tastes better. Mayonnaise is pretty delicious. I'd brush my teeth with it if I could.

Also, ten inch cocks.

Anyway.

I guess I tag...
Johnny Alien, the Bandit, Alejandra, Mo, Chris, Dylan, and Lewis, Jeremy, Gene and Brian because revenge is sweet and I know you won't do it again and I won't have to potentially read 10 blogs (that's 100 fucking factoids. What do I look like?)

New Banner

2008-01-21T20:45:00.000-05:00

What do you think of that?

It took all afternoon, but I'm pretty satisfied with the results.

The Worst Decision Ever Made (Coming Soon!)

2008-01-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

I'm applying to go to college. I'm also supposed to be applying for a job. Well, more correctly, I was supposed to send off my resume to a potential employer two days ago. I'm really weighing my options right now. The job pays somewhere between double and triple what I was making in the Army, it involves a lot of travel (a plus), great health benefits, and a great northern Virginia location. It's a small business, with a very informal management structure. Everything I've heard about the job has been a positive.

So why do I get the feeling that I'm about to email the owner of this company, attach my resume, and tell him that I'm not interested in the job right now?

College. But why go to college?

Honestly, it has a little bit to do with the American habit of tying personal worth to documented accomplishments. This sort of feeds into the pseudo-rockstar aspirations of my generation. The youth segment of our culture operates under the assumption that we can grow up to be what we want to be, regardless of how devoid of talent, skill or prowess we are. If you dream it, you can be it.

That's a lie. Not everyone grows up to be President, only 43 people have ever done that. The odds are far from good. You have a better chance of winning the first time you play the lotto. I know people who've never won a game of bingo. I think shooting for McDonald's manager is a more tangible goal for most Americans. We should tell our kids that they can be anything they want to be... within reason.

"You could grow up to manage a McDonald's."

There is nothing wrong with managing a McDonald's. I'm just saying, it's a reasonable destination for the child of a working class American family. We cut the Santa Claus crap before things get too out of hand, but we let children enter into adulthood thinking some pretty fantastic bullshit. If we exposed children to reasonable goals, then wouldn't they be more satisfied when they surpass those goals? Instead of managing a McDonald's, they become a regional manager, or an owner/operator, or the owner of a chain. Owning a chain of McDonald's, by any reasonable measure, should be considered a success. Still, it can't help but feel a whole lot like a let down for someone who once dreamed of managing the whole country.

I guess what I'm saying is, instead of telling our children they can grow up to be anything they "want to be" we should be telling them that they will grow up to be anything they "are capable of being", which for most Americans is actually quite a lot of things.

Being capable of being something, and wanting to be something are two different things. I want to be the guy with a ten inch cock, but barring a medical miracle I don't see it happening. I realize my limitations. NOTE: I will probably have a ten inch cock before anyone cures cancer, or ends the AIDS epidemic Africa. Why? Because the size of my cock is a bigger cultural issue in this country. Let's be honest, there's more money in large virile cocks than in sick children and old people. And frankly, it's more fun to talk about.

So, tangent much?

What's this have to do with the choice between college and employment? I guess I never really saw myself having a good paying job. I'm just not sure I need it. I know my limitations, and I also know that I'm a commercially viable writer. I want to make that money on my own terms. Taking this job wouldn't interfere with my publication at all, it wouldn't stop me from becoming what I've always dreamed of being.

So what's all the fuss about?

So why go to college?

Probably to meet girls. Seriously. I think that might be it. The degree itself isn't necessarily appealing in its own right, I just have this money that the Army promised me for college and I kind of want to use it. The problem is that I have too many choices, and my options aren't bad. So if work is clearly the more profitable and, by most measures, the best option available to me... then why go to college?

Social interaction.

I want to be judged on my dreams, not on my skills. I want to be around people who haven't failed at achieving their goals yet. I want to be in an environment where I can focus on being the person I want to be, not just the man I am capable of being. That and maybe I can pick up a pretty grad student who will get a good job and support me while I work on my "craft".

So, to all the adults out there who lied to me. Thanks for helping me make what could turn out to be the worst decision of my life.

Wake up Call

2008-01-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

So, Monday, I was outside the unemployment office... I mean, the library. I was reading a city ordnance about noise pollution in English and Korean (one of the few chances I get to bone up on my language skills outside the menu at the Korean Barbecue), when a young man of about 20 years approached me. First, he bummed a cigarette. The smoker's code dictates that if you have more than one then fork it over. I gave him a cigarette and turned back to reading, not particularly interested in engaging in conversation. He , however, had a different plan for the next three minutes of my life. I was to be regaled with tales of... suitably ironic adjectives fail me. So here's approximately how the conversation went...

Him: Hey. You remember Woody Woodpecker? You know? The cartoon.

At this point he was reaching for his cellphone. Alarms were going off. Big alarms. Flashy red-light alarms. Germans bombing London alarms. This guy was about to show me pictures of Woody Woodpecker fucking something.

Me: Yeah.

Him: Heh heh. Check this out.

He showed me a picture of Woody Woodpecker fucking a woman doggy-style.

Me: Inspiring.

Him: Yeah, now I have to send it to all my friends. And then I'll get a bunch of text messages and people will be like "What the fuck?" Heh heh.

Thomas Edison would be proud. This guy has friends.

Me: Maybe.

Him: And the really fucked up thing is my girl has the car, so I have to wait for her to pick me up.

The really fucked up thing is the three day waiting period to purchase firearms at Wal-Mart. He has friends and a girlfriend. There is no hope.

It's okay to laugh at Woody Woodpecker fucking someone when you're thirteen, that stuff was hilarious. 'Was' being the operative word. Eventually though, you've got to grow up. It doesn't seem like enough people are growing up. I guess I could say something about opportunities in America... but Christ, I have a feeling I'd just end up sounding more like an elitist prick. There's got to be a way to unlearn stupid.

Thankfully, this encounter helped me come to a realization. I need to make something out of my life quickly, or I'm going to be surrounded by pictures of beloved cartoon characters fucking things until I die.

College, gainful employment... here I come. That'll teach me for hanging out in front of the library.

Confusion. Electric Cars and Smoking in Bars.

2008-01-08T14:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I went on one of those YouTube walk-abouts that makes doing productive things like writing extraordinarily difficult. Some how, in the course of being damned to hell by thiests, poorly represented by outspoken athiests and completely baffled by scientology, I came across a surprising series of videos. Someone had ripped the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" to YouTube in nine parts. The whole thing was astonishing and mesmerizing for a number of reasons.

YOU CAN BUY THE DOCUMENTARY OR JUST GET THE FACTS HERE

In 1996 GM's Saturn division released the EV1, leasing 800 of these vehicles to drivers in California in response to the state's tough environmental legislature. These cars were on the road, in the hands of a test-group of consumers. Honda, Ford, Nissan, Toyota and Chrysler all released electric cars during this brief period between 1996 and 2000. Today, these vehicles are conspicuously unavailable.

The primary focus of the film is the radical lengths that automakers and various other organizations went to not only terminate the EV1 program, but to essentially erase its existence from the American consciousness. The EV1s were reclaimed from their drivers by the GM company, in spite of many offers to purchase the vehicles and assume maintenance responsibilities. They were trucked to GM's proving grounds in Arizona and scrapped. GM, however, assures the public that they were recycled... I guess they just needed the material to make more Hummers.

The documentary delves fairly deep into the issue, figuring out how America's government and industries dropped the ball on what could have been one of the most significant social revolutions of the last 100 years (not to mention the crux of one of America's chief economic and environmental struggles for the next 50 years).

It's dumbfounding that our politicians can get behind podiums and preach non-reliance on foreign oil supplies, researching alternative fuels and environmental initiatives when the primary solution was proven viable more than ten years ago. It's a slap in the face. It's a lie. The technology exists and has existed in one form or another for the better part of a century. Enough verbal slight-of-hand.

In the New Hampshire Republican debates hosted by ABC, Rudy Giuliani made a strong case for reducing dependency on foreign oil production as a matter of national security. He suggested a program comparable to the one that put man on the moon. Guess what? Man's already been on the moon, now we just need to keep him there.

This leads me to something of a personal conundrum, in so far as my political views go. How do I reconcile my desire to see a zero emissions electric car on the market with my view of a free economy driven by market forces and a business owner's right to self-determination? I can't.

I believe that outlawing smoking in bars is wrong. It infringes on the rights of an establishment to determine its environment, and prevents American citizens from engaging in a perfectly legal activity in a public area. Where these ordnances have passed, the business owner has been robbed of the right to offer a specific atmosphere that appeals to a particular group of patrons. All this for the sake of public health and the betterment of America.

I can't argue that cigarettes aren't bad for people, but I cannot in turn approve of any legislation that saps the liberties of citizens to conduct themselves freely. I support the rights of businesses to ban smoking in their establishment if that's the environment they want to offer their customers.

So what does smoking in bars have to do with the electric car? Everything.

My support of the government's right, or rather the government's duty, to mandate that automobile manufacturers have to produce viable zero emissions electric cars stems from the same line of reasoning. The idea that the government can impose restrictions on the nature of the end product or service provided by a business is a slippery ethical slope.

I can make a thousand arguments for the forced production of electric cars, but in the end all I'm doing is playing nanny for a conscienceless industry built on profit margins. In the end though, I have to condone safeguarding the American people against fraud. That's what this is, it's fraud, we are being sold an inferior product at great expense to our environment, our finances and our national security. It's also a message to the American consumer from the American consumer, you're dumb.

If our government was serious about opposing Hugo Chavez, we'd build an electric car. If North Korea was serious about opposing the United States, so would they. Instead, we build Hummers so we can buy oil from nations with significant anti-American leanings and they build nukes to make us look bad when we don't send them food to feed their starving masses. Way to go everybody, let's have a nice slow sarcastic clap for humanity.

I guess what I learned from this documentary is something that I may have already suspected about myself, my ideology is not perfect. Sometimes it becomes necessary to prioritize your beliefs and let one fail so that the other, more important belief, might succeed.

Here's the first of the series of YouTube segments for "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Once again, I encourage you to buy this, and not steal it from the internet, since these people deserve to get back every dime they spent on their documentary. Once again, I will sacrifice one of my beliefs and say... the message of this film is more important than compensating the people who made it. Do what you think is right...

Update: I found this blog post on Oikos that tackles the economic benefit of fuel efficiency.

Oikos: Will fuel efficiency laws save motorists money?