“In the world of women’s work, how one looks is as important, if not more important, than what one does: The existential anxiety of identity creation is also economic and social anxiety, because the penalties for nonconformity are so high. Feminine mystique becomes identity itself. The woman who does not possess it, the ugly woman, the overweight woman, the older woman, the woman of color who will not straighten her hair or bleach her skin, is assumed, in a very real sense, to be invisible. She is overlooked on the street, at parties, on dating websites, at job interviews. She is dogged by a feeling of unreality; she does not exist, and if she dares to ‘be herself,’ she is stunned to find that, since her social legitimacy is contingent on artifice, that self is not a legitimate social construct.” — Laurie Penny, “Model Behavior”
“It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.” — E.H. Carr (quoted by Roger Cohen in “Revealing ‘Turkey’s Hidden Past'”)
Ninety-eight years ago on this very day the so-called Great War (aka, the World War, aka the First World War) “broke out,” as wars are said to do. How did this misfortune come about? Through an unstoppable cascade of double-dog dares, to wit:
A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian (aka, Austro-Hungarian) duke;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) demanded some stuff from the Serbians for reparations;
The Serbians said, No way, man;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, You don’t give over, we’re going to attack;
The Serbians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Russians said to the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians), We be friends with the Serbians and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Germans said to the Russians, We be friends with the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians, though we prefer the Austrians) and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Russians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The French said to the Germans, We be friends with the Russians, since their dukes and duchesses and stuff all speak French, and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Germans said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The British, who more or less wanted to stay out of things–or, truth be told, wanted to play all these other folks off against each other so they could scoop up the pieces–said, We don’t really have a dog in this fight, but we do be friends with the Belgians so if anyone (and Germans, we mean you) thinks to march through Belgium to get to, oh, let’s say France, perchance, well, you see, it would be a terrible bother, but we can’t see how we would have any choice other really, than to come to their aid, what with it being impolite to do otherwise;
To which the Germans said, We double-dog dare you, you irrelevant English swine (which was fisticuffs-provoking insult to those British who were not English).
All the double-dog dares being in place and ignored, the attacks and counterattacks and countercounterattacks and countercountercounterattacks ad nauseam began and forty million (40,000,000) dead people later they ended. Along the way, Japan and the United States entered the war, also as part of the double-dog-dare cascade, to wit:
Japan saw an opportunity to pitch in with the what were called Allies and scoop up German territories in the Pacific. They double-dog dared the Germans to try and stop them, to which the Germans muttered, We cannot stop you, all our dogs are in other fights.
The United States just wanted to make money and when the Germans started fucking with the money-maker by sinking United Stateser ships, the United States said, Stop it or we’ll pitch in with the what are called Allies and we will show you a thing or two.
The Germans said, You are degenerate Americans and we double-dog dare you.
So the degenerate Americans from the United States Thereof pitched in and the what were called Allies won and the decline of Western Civilization, which began on this date ninety-eight years ago, continued apace, with the American Empire coming along after yet a second world war (they couldn’t get it right the first time?) to shine and burn brightly as the final efflorescence of what for a half-millennium had been a powerful civilization pretty full of itself but quickly at its end going to the dogs.
“Under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual. To pursue the concept of racial entitlement–even for the most admirable and benign of purposes–is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.” — Anthony Scalia, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta, 534 U.S. 103 (1995)
I gotta get rant-a-rific here for a few. I just got off the phone with a major American airline which I won’t embarrass by naming outright, but if you like, you could say its name rhymes with benighted. I was on the phone with them for a fucking hour trying to correct, or verify the correction of, a $75 mistake they made. And when I say I was on the phone for an hour, that means I was on hold for most of that time, listening to an endless loop of Rhapsody in Blue, except for the two times early on when the menu selections I made failed because those parts of this Dinosaur Corp.’s phone system no longer work, and the few minutes toward the end of this when I finally got to speak to a person (who was actually in the United States, which pleases me, atavistic chauvinist that I sometimes am (an effect of growing older, methinks)).
A fucking hour. It’s like I was dealing with an obscure bureau in some third-world country, address 1984 Kafka Avenue in Downtown Chaotica. An hour! A major airline! Now, I’m an old but I’m not ancient. I’m well over a decade away from retirement, should I in fact be able to retire. I well remember a time when in this country–in this country, boys and girls–that simply never would have happened. Americans had more pride than to pretend to run a business where people were kept waiting on the phone for an hour. I like to think we still do, but here I am dancing the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to a tune I don’t recall having any part in calling, and it’s a whistling past the graveyard for anyone to think it doesn’t matter that major businesses are run that way. Look around. See all the crumbling? Yeah, we sure as shittin’ all do. Anyone care to dance?
And at the end of it all, the poor soul who tried to help me, bless her heart, couldn’t provide any sort of verification that the problem had actually been solved, even though she said she’s pretty sure it was. But that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to run a business like that, or a government like that, or a school like that, where there’s no one on duty, no one who can assist, no one who knows what’s going on, no one to take responsibility, no one who is willing and able to get to the bottom of things, no one to step up and say, We can fix this–we are better than this. It’s time to clear away the rot.
“If the poor be poor in heart and spirit as well as in appearance, how will they be aught but poor to the end of their days?” – “The Poor Turkey Girl,” Zuñi Folk Tales, Frank Cushing
Rarely do I get personal on this website. Maybe a little in responding to the comments (which are almost exclusively from Averil Dean), but not out here on the main floor. The past few months have been a time of significant transition for me, which I don’t expect to mean jack to anyone else, but which I will use as an excuse to acknowledge by posting this:
High Street has been accepted for publication by Outpost19, “Provocative Digital Publishing” (http://outpost19.com/), so I have removed it this morning from this website. Excerpts from it may be re-posted here soon as part of the marketing of the book, which should be available for purchase as an e-book through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com (and others yet to be determined) in a couple of months or so.
“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.” — Freya Stark (quoted in “East Is West” by Claudia Roth Pierpont)
“While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
“99 percent of lawyers don’t understand the prison designation and correctional process, and the 1 percent who do are all doing time.” — Ellis & Shummon, Federal Prison Guidebook
“Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” — Basho (from “Aftershocks,” by Evan Osnos)
Colorado is one of the places where God kissed Mother Earth. Susanne and I spent the past few days there, in and around the Conejos River valley.
When we arrived at our lodge, the first thing management wanted us to know was that a bear had been through the compound the night before, thoroughly inspecting the trash cans. The District Wildlife Manager had been by later that morning and had left a supply of circulars to be circulated, “Be Bear Aware.” We have bears near where we live, so we already generally were. One of the things the circular instructed one to do “if bears are present” is to “remove all bird feeders, including hummingbird feeders.” Lodge management had taken down the hummingbird feeders not long before we arrived. The hummingbirds were pissed off. They were diving down on the chains from which the newly-removed feeders had been hanging, and were flying about with the angry buzz they put in their wingbeats when they are upset. They’re fiercely territorial animals, as anyone who’s ever been buzz-bombed by one can attest.
We didn’t get to see the bear, it didn’t come back around while we were there. We saw deer, which is not hard to do in Colorado. They were mule deer, so common they might be considered the four-legged finch of the Rockies. There were also plenty of GEICO squirrels, playing Truth-or-Dare with passing vehicles. And free range cattle, there were those, at one point a herd of them being driven down the road by two mounted drovers (“cowboys,” yes) and an Australian sheepdog.
There was a train, the Cumbres & Toltec, which pulls carloads of tourists through the mountains along a narrow-gauge track that a century and more ago was the way to get around up there. The train is pulled by one of the little engines that could, chugging along, slightly sulfurous black smoke pouring from its funnel. Susanne and I rode it, taking the parlour car, which is the last car on the train, far removed from the smokestack. We were served Danishes, fruits, and rum cake, while the car attendant was quick to evict anyone from the car who hadn’t secured parlour-car passage. No, the attendant did not throw the miscreants under the railcars, simply shooed them back to the cattle-car where they belonged. Several of the Republican guests in the parlour car complained, having preferred to see the interlopers tossed from the train and made to walk back down the mountain to the station, but the Democrats, who always outnumber the Republicans though at times are slothful and inattentive, would have none of it and proposed that everyone on the train be allowed into the parlour car. “Let them eat rum cake,” the Democrats said, “a crumb apiece for everyone,” to which the Republicans struck up a chant of, “Nanny-staters! Nanny-staters!”, until the car attendant got everyone settled down and back in their proper and duly-purchased places.
Susanne and I spent the next day along the banks of the Conejos, sitting under the trees while the waters rushed by. Downstream a little ways, a fly-fisherman cast and cast again. Susanne had her pencils and her sketchbook, and she sketched. I had a copy of the manuscript I’ve been working on, and on it I did work. Robins and crows and other birds were about. Mosquitoes sought meals, and many died for their efforts. Hummingbirds remained angry and went elsewhere.
“Conejos” means “rabbits,” but we didn’t see any of those.
“Parenting is hard. As any one who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, “America’s Top Parent”