Shake the Disease

The October 6th, 1783 issue of The Onion News-Paper -- available this week and online -- has on it's final page an advertisement for "John Jameson's Miracle Concoction," which is said to provide aid for:

Torpid Innard; Anchorite's Droop; Moth-Bowell; Leadminer's Complaint; Flaccidity of the Tongue; Magnet-Rash; Horse-Shoe-To-The-Head; New-Hampshireman's Quandry; The Feathers; Superfluous Haire; The Drippling Illness; Whoopsy Lung; The Brackets; Gold Fevor; Bewitchment; Thumb Tumefaction; Beard Crickets; Soot-mouth; Milkman's Teat-Finger; Bucket-Mender's Knee; Air-Borne Toxic Eventualities; The Gargling Horrors; The Falling Hollies; The Vapors; Delicacy Spells; Accumulation of Excessive Humors; Astrologicks; Mulish Bladder; Stubborn Coccyx; Irritable Skull; Mistaken Heruistics; Boatswain's Dis-Order; Dog-Stink; Un-Stoppable Tooth Growth

In addition to jokes of anatomy and philosophy and the sheer looniness of applied English, there are Don Delillo and H.P. Lovecraft references in there if you want them. Oh, and by the way: in the Marvel Comics Universe, John Jameson -- son of J. Jonah -- is an lycantropic astronaut known as the Man-Wolf.

At least one person, noticing a tendency in Sarah Palin to slip in and out of her Fargo accent, has diagnosed Intermittent Gunderson Syndrome.

More fake diseases can be found in the Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

Commencing Countdown, Engines On

1. Obviously, two-sided debates lead us to suppose that there must be one winner and one loser, but can we let go of the overworked and tired and brain-damaged metaphor that poses political debate as a prizefight? "There was no knockout," said several talking heads about last night's debate, and a headline following the Biden/Palin debate claimed no blood was drawn, and always this is then qualified with the idea that one or the other "won on points." But -- the Gore/Quayle/Stockdale vice presidential debate of 1996 aside -- what would a knockout even look like, in political terms?

2. As a corollary, if pundits are going to call the debate like a boxing match, they've got to be willing to discuss the blows feinted, landed, or missed. This means discussing policy, as opposed to (or at least, more fairly, in addition to) focusing on response poll results, the behavior and appearance of candidates, and "truth squadding" discernable facts. Since television is a visual medium, there's no escaping the beauty contest element (and, all apologies to Walnuts, the congeniality issue), but the reason the post-debate polls have been so strongly in favor of Obama have to also reflect, I would think, on what is actually being said.


3. In proposing an additional bailout specifically for the housing market, McCain risks losing some of his conservative base. The suggestion that health insurance should not cover hair transplants will certainly cost him a significant portion of the bald-and-loathing-it contingent, a population which has kitchen table immediacy in my extended family. The suggestion that $3 million is too much to spend on a planetarium almost surely cost McCain the Sam and Caleb vote, since they are all about the moon and stars lately.

4. McCain does deserve some moxie points for trying to suggest to the American people that this overhead project er is pretty much the same as that one in your 9th-grade Geometry class. (As I'm sure you and Sam and Caleb will be interested to know, it turns out that the Adler Planetarium in Chicago is putting up a show that introduces kids to astronomy with the help of Big Bird and the Sesame Street Muppets. So McCain hates science and Sesame Street now?)

5. Due to the risk of counting chickens or looking at the mouths of gift horses, and with our modest and Midwestern superstitions -- the sort whereby one does not mention that the children are sleeping well as that sort of thing ultimately leads to a 3am wake-up -- fully in mind, I am not going to start celebrating yet, but I will say -- with fingers crossed, and qualifications in the case of some unforeseen calamity and with what may be the sort of amorphous verbiage that Wallnuts might call pre-conditions -- I think we've f*cking won.

Leaves on Your Ouija Board

As a break from politics and pensiveness, here's some pictures from September:

Uncle Eric and Cousin Aidan encourage Caleb's daredevil streak.

In India, or the version of it on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

On his Daddy's birthday, we discovered Caleb's shade of lipstick.

Sam perhaps needs something less gaudy.

The city is tearing up our street to improve our sewers. The boys lend a hand.

Substitute the shovel for an electric guitar, and Caleb has another album cover. For some reason, this photo reminds me of the Berlin Wall.

Sam and Aidan, volunteering for Public Works.

Trevor, Rachel, and Bree visit from Colorado for Rachel's first Milwaukee fish fry at Lakefront Brewery.

The beer barrel polka.

Bree, Rachel, and Sam in our living room.

Friday night included a 19th century style gather 'round the piano, where Karl and Kirsten belted out "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and, um, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

Trevor took the lead on the Eagles' "Desperado." We all shared Rachel's response.

At this year's Jerkfest, the boys monopolized Isabell Anderson's cars, displaying none of the patience and grace that Annika Johnson shows here. The jerk was not as spicy as last year's, but was still mighty fine.

Tomorrow's Debate Today!

I'm not sure why Barack Obama is dressed as Batman, although its fairly self-evident why John McCain would wear a top hat, tails, and a cigarette holder.

Special appearance by Joe Biden as Robin.

So That'd Be Your Friend In the Wood-Chipper, Then?

Gosh darn it, you just don't get any folksier than Governor Sarah Palin, do ya? She's so folksy she said "Doggone it" in a nationally televised debate that touched on domestic policy issues, financial crisis, and two wars. She's so folksy I'm pretty sure she spent the middle part of the debate in a rocking chair, smoking a corn cob pipe. She's so folksy that every one of her gerunds had dropped "g"-sounds; she uses erunds. But then, yer talkin' to a New York Times-reading, latte-sipping middle-American who cares about things like diplomacy, science, and civil rights, so what do I know?

While I don't totally understand the distinctions drawn between civil unions and gay marriages, I was really happy that the topic was somewhat frankly discussed last night, but there's an important distinction between proposing gay rights and Palin's declaration that a McCain/Palin administration would not oppose such rights.

What the folksy stuff undermines, and this became very clear in the middle section of the debate (particularly as Biden became more energetic and lively), is the notion of diplomacy. Harry Truman joked that the role of vice president was to attend weddings and funerals, and he's not entirely wrong. Suppose -- and let's hope it's a long time from now-- that we lose Nelson Mandela or, say, Queen Elizabeth. Can you imagine Sarah Palin among the assembled dignitaries at a state funeral? Has she earned a spot at those functions, with her passport hardly two years old? Who, between her and Joe Biden, would best represent the dignity and sobriety of the American people in times that call for gravity and somberness? I've yet to see the non-ex-beauty queen side of Palin.

Despite from her W-like relationship with the English language and her Fargo accent and a manner that makes Paula Deen look like Edith Sitwell, I worry about making fun of or lashing out at Governor Palin. (Despite her opening "Hey, can I call ya Joe?" Biden was careful to call her by her title throughout the evening. He called her Sarah once, but corrected himself.) It's clear that the fun had at her expense by SNL and, well, everyone else with a sense of humor is playing into the conservatives' "Culture War" frame, a contrived but popular manipulation that plays to the rural red states in order to generate the fear that liberals will take away their money and their guns, their Nascar and their always low prices, always.

Sarah Palin is clearly not dumb -- her ability to nuance and manipulate in the debate demonstrates that. But "not dumb" is not the same as "able to lead."

Spotlight on Sam

Likes:
Fruit Chews or Gummi Bears
Giving instructions (such as "Stand right there" or "No, Daddy, no singing!")
Toy trucks
Dinosaurs
Mommy
His Little People School Bus book
A good chase

Dislikes:
Having his nails clipped
The Edward U. Demmer Fund sponsorship message that comes on just before Sesame Street

Spotlight on Caleb

Likes:
Construction equipment and heavy machinery
Trucks and buses
Cookies
Juice
Go Diego Go!
Using faucets
The alphabet, esp. the letters B, O, S, and X
Counting
Banana pajamas

Dislikes:
Mandy Patinkin

Crisis, Collapse, and Bailout

In an effort to help restore confidence in financial markets and heal our ailing economy, I think it's well past time that I came clean about my role in the global collapse of the BRLP (Brian Re-Literacy Project).

At the start of summer, I inveiled myself on the arduous, nigh-impossible project of reading one book a week (from the libary system's 7-day loan shelves) through summer, all while working full time, raising two toddlers, attending to household responsibilities, and becoming increasingly obsessed with electoral politics. Some will say that the project was doomed to failure from the start, and my response to such critics is: Spot-on prediction! Have you considered sending your resume to Lehman Brothers? They could probably use an insightful, forward-looking analyst like you.

The last update on the BRLP concerned a faltering attempt at getting through a book on the Works Progress Administration, along with a renewed effort that would begin with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. While certainly compelling and innovative in it's oral history-like style, it soon became clear that I wasn't going to finish the book within a week, or even two. We took a trip to Boston in early August, and I worried that I might lose or damage the book so -- since it belonged to the library and not to me -- I set the book aside to read up on some of Barack Obama's policy positions in The Audacity of Hope.

After returning home, I passed the halfway mark in Savage Detectives, but a weekend visit from my English Composition posse meant setting the book aside again to make way for certain hangovers. That Sunday afternoon, with a bloody mary in one hand and four aspirin winding their way through my bloodstream, I aimed to take up the book again. I didn't find it on my nightstand, nor in the office or the living room. It was not under the couch or under the kids' cribs, or anywhere in the house. The Savage Detectives was missing.

Monday, I found that the book was not on or in my desk at work, not left by the printer or the photocopier, not filed away with the spare pound of coffee beans or cough drops, not even in the drawer that houses a few remaining thank you cards that I never sent following my March 2005 wedding.

It was not in the car. It was not at the Student Union lost and found.

I thought for sure it would turn up. I avoided talking about the book, or saying anything more about it. I tried visualization exercises, trying to imagine where I was on Wednesday, August 13th, the last day I spent with the book. I read other things, including some stories by Samantha Clarke, the second half of David Mitchell's excellent Cloud Atlas, and The Essential Groucho.

Today, my long-suffering and put-upon wife finally took it upon herself to call up the library and arrange to pay late fines and the cost of replacing the book. So, you know, thanks for the bailout! I promise to be more fiscally responsible in the future, and only borrow what I know I'm able to give back.

(Meanwhile, I've taken full financial ownership of a copy of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which so far seems like a much more profluent and readable version of the last third of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. It includes the idea -- one I will fully support -- that men who wear mustaches ought to have some sort of special talent, like archery, card tricks, or palindromes. Seems to have merited it's National Book Award on that observation alone, if you ask me.)

------

P.S. I presume that the Shorewood Public Library's copy of The Savage Detectives is either hanging out in Mexico City cafes (as in the first third of the novel), backpacking around Europe (as in the second third), or on the run from a murderous pimp in the Sonoran desert (third third). If anyone should happen upon this book, please know that I'd be grateful for the opportunity to finish reading the book. Also note that it no longer belongs to the Shorewood Public libary, but instead to American taxpayers. And, more specifically, my wife.

Watch the Monkey Get Hurt, Monkey

I don't presume to know much about economics.  To say that I skipped that class in college would be a huge understatement -- I skipped the whole department.  Didn't even go in the building.

But it's an interesting time to be reading  Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's insight into "disaster capitalism," whereby radical free-marketeers such as those currently in power seek to use moments of disaster and crisis to implement economic changes that serve their interests.

Here's some text from page 174:

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

And from page 175:

The kind of crisis Friedman had in mind was not military but economic. What he understood was that in normal circumstances, economic decisions are made based on the push and pull of competing interests -- workers want jobs and raises, owners want low taxes and relaxed regulation, and politicians have to strike a balance between these competing forces. However, if an economic crisis hits and is severe enough -- a currency meltdown, a market crash, a major recession -- it blows everything else out of the water, and leaders are liberated to do whatever is necessary (or said to be necessary) in the name of responding to a national emergency. Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones -- gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.

Note that in Bush's speech to the nation tonight, he suggested that -- as Washington hurries to repair a crisis long felt by middle America, but only recently affecting corporations -- there should be no immediate changes to the lax or absent regulations that allowed such circumstances to come about in the first place.

From Page 200: 

Friedman's crisis theory became self-reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export-oriented economies, the more crisis-prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the types of meltdowns he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his advice.

Vote Barack Obama: He Probably Knows Who John Maynard Keynes Is.

The Struggle Itself Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart

In his excellent The Art of Fiction, John Gardner makes the argument that:

“To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.”

I first read Gardner's book in my very-early twenties when I first started trying seriously to write, and that particular passage -- and its argument about one's moral obligation to humankind -- became incredibly important to me. I take Gardner to mean that one has a moral duty to be life-affirming, to suggest ways out of darkness, and to generally echo Albert Camus' solution to the "one truly serious philosophical problem." (This is not to say that art can't be dark, pessimistic, or immoral, or that it can't suggest that evil often wins or that darkness can overcome, only that art -- or in Gardner's rendering, art "with taste" -- ought not leave someone in greater pain or despair. Vonnegut, for example, was no cheerleader for the human condition, but his bleak humor and rationality were fireflies in the gloom.)

David Foster Wallace was a writer who had some impact on me in my Boston years and his death this past weekend has stuck with me. My initial response -- having heard of Wallace's death from a friend's e-mail on Sunday morning -- was probably too crass and dismissive, and tied into the problems I'd developed with Wallace's writing style. An incredibly smart and exacting writer, Wallace was also interested in formal and stylistic innovation which -- at times -- seemed a bit too clever for my tastes. There's a lot of Wallace that's worth reading-- particularly in Girl With Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing... -- but the cleverness, the syntactic exercises, and his headiness eventually wore out on me. Infinite Jest, while a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading while in the act of reading it, sort of lives up to its title too exactingly.

Since Sunday, though, I've been thinking a lot about Wallace's story "The Depressed Person" , which I read in Harper's Magazine when it was published in 1998 (strangely, it seems a lot fresher in my mind than that -- I would have guessed it appeared in this decade). While not a very dramatic story, Wallace establishes and cements a mindset of a depressed woman; all of the action of the story takes place in its footnotes. Depression, as the story presents it, is a kind of extreme self-centeredness, an obsession with self that washes out the rest of the world (including, within the story, the illness and death by cancer of the depressed person's closest friend). Wallace's story -- and the idea that depression is a malady of solipsism -- drew some heat in Harper's letters pages, but I think it ultimately adheres to Gardner's definition of writing with taste. It's idea is one that has helped me out of a dark spot or two, now somewhat complicated by Wallace's apparent suicide.

At an important time in my life, the right person gave me the right book. That book says:

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

As Lou Reed said, my life was saved by rock and roll.