Forever Isn't Over Yet

Alibran? I’ll tell you the story of Bloody Bran. I’ll tell you what my father told me when he was as drunk as I am. You won’t read that in those books of yours and you won’t hear it from those prissy old ladies you talk to. And you won’t hear it from me tomorrow before the tavern opens, or from any other sober man.

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When I was six, and my sister was four, our family lived in a small rented house on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain in Slidell. It was a wild, remote, very beautiful place set in a broad cleared space surrounded by trees and brush. The blazing Louisiana sun made the leaves glitter and the long grass hot against our legs in the daytime. The nights were loud with frogs and insects and the long burp of gators. To step outside at dusk was to walk into a curtain of mosquitoes. I remember the interior of that little house as cool and dim and faintly rustic, with lots of dark wood and a stone floor in the living room. My sister and I shared a room at the back of the house, where, to save space, our twin beds had been pushed together. Mom and Dad’s room adjoined ours.

I liked our parents’ bedroom because it had what I called “secret passages.” It was so completely and totally lined with the dark wood paneling popular in the early ‘60s that it didn’t have proper doors. Both the door to the hall and the door to the master bathroom were little more than man-sized vertical flaps cut into the room’s paneling, with little knobs added on as an afterthought and “locks” that were nothing more than hook and eye arrangements. Once the doors were closed – and they both swung closed completely unless propped open -- they were pretty much invisible to anyone in the room who didn’t know exactly where they were.

One night our parents, who were still in their twenties, had a party. An advantage to being that age and renting a house out in the middle of a Louisiana swamp is that you can throw loud parties without the neighbors complaining. My sister and I were always entertained by our parents’ parties. Even after we’d been sent to bed, we could usually hear and enjoy what was going on.

That night, Crosby had come over. I think every family has a Crosby, the naughty bachelor friend who tells good stories and brings a different girl with him on every visit. Late into the evening, a bit after the music and laughter had peaked but while the liquor was still flowing, Crosby needed to go to the bathroom. There was already a long queue to the little hall toilet, so he decided to use the one that adjoined our parents’ room.

From our bedroom my sister and I heard him announce this intention. We heard several tipsy, ribald “good lucks” to him from the people in the queue to the other bathroom. We heard the “door” to our parents’ room open, then shut behind him. We heard a metallic rattle as Crosby fumbled with the little hook and eye on that first door and managed to latch it.

We listened with great interest.

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Mark Twain once wrote that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. There are also lies, damn lies, and cites. One of the first things I learned when I started discussing issues online is that when someone offers a cite that can be tracked down, eight times out of ten it:

A) doesn’t say what the person claims it says,

B) directly contradicts what the person claims it says,

or,

C) consists entirely of an opinion piece that merely echoes the opinion cited by the original poster without offering any factual backup that can be checked.

Keep in mind, by the way, that I started online in the early 1980s, back when computer bulletin board discussions tended to be longer, more detailed and frankly, a lot more intelligent. Even then, there were people who either didn’t understand what a “cite” was, or did and assumed that the other person wouldn’t bother to check it. Before links and online resources were common, that was not an entirely unwarranted assumption. The fact that I had access to a good library and learned early on how to use hardcopy resources like periodical archives, statistical abstracts, and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature gave me a definite leg up.

Today, even with online databases and archives and quick access through links, an inability to grasp the importance of facts is even more endemic. The abstract, non-physical community of the Internet apparently makes it easier for a poster to announce “The sky is brown” and not only stick to it, but count on a bevy of other posters who will repeat in chorus “The sky is brown” until people stop being startled by it and just accept it as another opinion upon which sane and intelligent people can disagree.

Eva Erdokalna came from a theatrical background. Her mother was a moderately successful actress named Auguste Erdokalna who performed as a singer and a comedienne in minor companies under the name Marie La Bienvielle. It is not known who her father was. According to Eva Erdokalna herself, he was a minor nobleman who vanished quite suddenly before she was born, possibly the victim of foul play.

“Like many actresses, my mother was superstitious and in the year leading up to my father’s disappearance she was a regular client of one of the most notorious fortune tellers in Vebrenz, visiting the woman more and more frequently once she realized her condition. She stopped going, she told me, the day she read that my grandfather was having the lakes dragged for his son’s body on and around his estate. ‘You can’t seize the rudder of fate,’ was the way she would always conclude this story -- looking at me and heaving a regretful sigh.”

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Our much heralded lunchtime event with Da Mayor took place yesterday without too many hitches. In spite of some dire predictions – “He’s always late you know. Always” -- and the announcement the day before by his social secretary that he could only stay until a little after 1:00, Mayor Willie Brown stepped out of the elevator at exactly 12:00 and cheerfully settled down to signing and occasionally personalizing copies of his book, Basic Brown for attendees. He gave his talk, held a Q&A, and stayed a good half hour past the time we’d been told he absolutely positively had to leave. (The warning about him being always late impacted not us but his next appointment.)

Willie Brown is a true San Francisco character who will probably be remembered in the same way Abe Ruef, Lillie Coit, and Melvin Belli are remembered. I see him occasionally in our neighborhood, usually walking up Leavenworth. There seems to be a legal requirement that the word “dapper” appear in any description of Willie Brown, but it’s not an unreasonable one. Yes, by God, the man is dapper as all Hell. His taste in ties and suits is impeccable, his hat is always set at a perfect angle, and his handkerchief always peeks out in four precise little points from his breast pocket. Listening to him speak is like watching a magician. Brown is adept at a sort of verbal sleight of hand in which you become so engaged by his wit that you only notice after he’s finished that he just spent thirty minutes talking about himself to an extent that would be dull and irritating if he were anybody else. I do believe he could make an hour-long lecture on tax law entertaining by including at least five anecdotes about Willie Brown. And it might very well be a damned good lecture on tax law.

Well why shouldn’t he be delighted with himself? He was born poor and black in Mineola Texas. He’s now rich and powerful in San Francisco California. How he managed this, whether by hook or by crook, is worth knowing. He is smart, pragmatic and absolutely ruthless. He has the faux naïve charm of a bon vivant who considers the fact that he enjoys good things wonderful news that should be shared with everyone. The day before the event one our members dropped by the office to make his reservation and told us an anecdote about encountering Brown at Wilkes-Bashford, passing him in the store. The weave of Brown’s suit was so beautiful. so soft, that he tentatively reached out to touch it, and Da Mayor stopped, grinned, and obligingly held out his arm.

His ghost-writer, P.J. Corkery did a wonderful job. Basic Brown is no ordinary boring political memoir. It begins with a description of Brown’s dirt-poor childhood in Texas, then leaps to an almost gleeful account of Brown’s deft and merciless payback to the “gang of five” who tried to oust him as Speaker back in 1988.

I have some serious problems with Willie Brown as a politician. During his tenure as mayor, many working class San Franciscans, many artists and filmmakers were driven out of the city because of his emphasis on development. The only citizens he seemed willing to acknowledge as worthwhile San Franciscans were either the people he encountered at the Big Four or other uber-wealthy hangouts or the affluent-on-paper young dot-commers who helped drive rents into the sky (many of whom by now have probably moved out of the lofts they infested in SOMA and back into their parents basements.) He’s even quoted as saying at one point, “poor people shouldn’t live in San Francisco.”

He never keeps records he declared, smiling, during his talk. “When I was an attorney, I learned that’s how people got in trouble. So no records. No emails, no letters, nothing.”

There’s a scene in the horror film, The Ninth Gate, where a wicked old woman says that, as a young girl, she once glimpsed Satan himself. “I saw him one day. I was fifteen years old, and I saw him as plain as I see you now: cutaway, top hat, cane. Very elegant, very handsome. It was love at first sight.”

At the time, I pictured Satan as a dashing young Italian count. Now I’ll always imagine the Devil she saw as a rather stocky late-middle aged black man with a moustache, a tilted hat and a perfectly tailored suit.

One of the writer’s block questions here at Live Journal recently was ,”Have you ever seen a ghost?” No, I haven’t, so I didn’t post an answer. I have, however, experienced a ghost. A few years ago I wrote that experience into a short story entitled “The House on the Bayou” that was published in Space and Time, so there’s the remote chance that someone reading this already knows that version of it. But “The House on the Bayou” was fiction and I swear – the part of this story that I can vouch for is perfectly true.

The house on Bayou Desierd was where my father and uncles grew up. It was a shady, white-painted, single storied home, built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge I think, and it sat high on the bank overlooking Desierd. I still associate that house with all that was romantic and secure about childhood. Mystery permeated it, but it was a pleasant mystery for me as a child, the mystery of fairy tales and my father’s past. The only thing that ever came close to truly frightening me there was the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace in the Sun Room where our grandmother entertained, and after a while I managed to make friends with it (though I could never bring myself to touch the its eyes. I was positive it would blink.)

Whenever we visited, my sister and I would sleep in the room Dad had once shared with his younger brother, and I would always sleep in Dad’s old bed. It was an incredibly heavy sort of metal cot, very comfortable, but next to impossible for a single person, even an adult, to move. It was also very low. My sister and brother and I knew every hiding place in the house and its front, back and side yards, and that cot was no more feasible to hide under than the old chiffarobe in our grandparents’ bedroom. One look at the bed’s dark, low-slung underside and its barrier of metal levers and hinges was enough to send most sensible kids scrambling to find someplace else in a game of hide and seek.

Which as why the behavior of that bed baffled me. Frequently – not every night I slept there, but often enough – it would shake so hard I’d wake up.

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I baked a cheesecake last night and I'm now enjoying it one soft velvety spoonful at a time. Since I've never liked graham cracker crusts I did a pate-brisee instead. Flavored the cake with vanilla, almond extract and Amaretto liqueur, and spooned on a sour-cream Amaretto topping. (This is not my own recipe. I can't remember where it comes from. Maybe the Silver Palate series?) My own addition to it was to slice up some strawberries after the cake had cooled, arrange them on the top, and brush them with a glaze of strawberry jam and brandy. Very nice.

We're up to our chins in strawberries in this house because they were on sale a couple days ago and I couldn't NOT buy them. Unfortunately, there are only so many strawberries we can put in our morning shredded wheat. I had to get rid of some, hence the cake.

So you see, it was really very self-sacrificing and frugal of me.

It’s always risky to read what a fiction writer Thinks About Things, “things” being issues in the real world. It’s especially risky when that writer writes science fiction, a genre that often involves some weird takes on the real world and society. Larry Niven has written some of my favorite science fiction short stories, but this, which I got courtesy of Sadly No, qualifies as one of those head-slapping, groaning moments. His suggestion for dealing with the healthcare crisis? Read it and weep.

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.



“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

I know, I know, it’s not news that Niven is a flaming right-winger. It’s just that the freight of astounding cluelessness, not to mention callousness carried in this brief statement is a reminder of the overlap between right-wing politics and some areas of science fiction and fantasy. Norman Spinrad (who has written his share of head-slapping, oh-dear-God takes on the real world) dissected this brilliantly in The Iron Dream.

It’s a connection that most frequently comes out in discussions with right-wing libertarians. After a few posts, you begin to realize that this person’s vision of an ideal society is closest to some post-apocalyptic science fiction novel or high fantasy, and involves him/her striding through a crowded and dangerous marketplace, wearing either an automatic weapon and military fatigues or a sword and a rippling cape. Never, never do they seem to imagine themselves as one of the hoi-polloi in such a world, part of the struggling masses whose misfortunes form a colorful backdrop to the ubermensch main character.

And so you have a millionaire like Larry Niven suggesting a good way to control hospital costs is to frighten the low income Latino community in general (all of whom he apparently defines as “illegal aliens) from availing themselves of medical care. Presumably all these grubby peasants will find some place to bleed or cough themselves to death out of sight or earshot from folks like Mr. Niven.

And no doubt any contagious diseases they contract will thoughtfully refrain from spreading as these unvaccinated and untreated people clean, cook, and baby-sit for the rest of us.

I am a festival widow this week. Until a week from Thursday, M is going to be busy at the International Film Festival, watching movies, schmoozing, schnorring, interviewing, etc. Because we wrote some of the program notes I’ve already seen a few of the films, though I’ll try to get out to see a couple more over the week. Late on Saturday afternoon, after hearing an enthusiastic description from a friend, I met M at The Castro to watch the restored version of Leave Her to Heaven, which is described in the program as “Technicolor Noir.”

Leave Her to Heaven is a perfect Castro film. For one thing, this wonderful restoration really is best appreciated on an epic-sized screen. Yes, Technicolor does look artificial, but it’s in the sense that the colors of a beautiful painting are artificial. The browns and golds are richer, the sky bluer, sunsets deeper and more dramatic. And the melodramatic plot of Leave Her to Heavenn lends itself to the Castro, where audiences tend to participate, faintly hissing the villains, moaning at moments of heartbreak, murmuring uneasily at signs of danger…

We were all fairly restrained for a Castro audience last Saturday, though you could feel everyone shudder every time some skin-crawling hint was delivered early on about what a sick, sick girl Gene Tierney was. The hints in that movie come so thick and fast that by the time she’s maneuvered Cornel Wilde into marrying her it’s hard to maintain much sympathy for him. Who but a complete chowderhead would marry a woman two days after a dinner party that she spent enthusing about how much he looks like her recently deceased father? Any sensible man would have started backing away and invoking a nonexistence fiancée after she’d gathered everyone around a picture of Dad and invited them to comment on the resemblance. And Mom’s resigned expression every time she looks at her daughter, along with the fact that she has an adopted daughter (Jeanne Crain) who was apparently taken on as a badly needed emotional back up should have tipped him off that there was something abnormal about that whole family dynamic.

Gene Tierney had a spectacular overbite, and Cornel Wilde at that age was so doe-eyed he resembled a Keane painting, so the predator vs. deer-in-the-headlights dynamic is believable up to a point. Vincent Price minus his moustache makes an appearance early on in the film as Tierney’s spurned fiancé, and his slithery, blue-blooded, freakishly tall good looks do make him look like a more appropriate mate for her than Wilde. Nobody but Price could make the passionate statement “I will always love you,” sound quite so much like a threat. You can have a pretty good time mulling over what that marriage would have looked like while watching the train-wreck of her union with Wilde unfold in glorious Technicolor.

Or you could just watch the train wreck. Most of the screenplay is so deftly put together that you can see and believe the people around this couple -- like a doctor caring for her invalid brother-in-law, and an old family friend and retainer at the family lake house -- being seriously freaked out by this obvious borderline case well before her besotted husband figures it out. There is a broad daylight murder that’s one of the most harrowing I’ve ever watched, and a death scene that's so creepy that the audience let out a long collective, “eeeeeeew” (and I mean this in a good way.)

Unfortunately, in the last twenty minutes the film devolves into a completely illogical courtroom drama that is plainly intended to set up the unbelievable, tacked-on happy ending. Tierney was no great shakes as an actress, but the nasty woman she plays is the heart of this rather disturbing movie. Once she’s gone, it’s just not as interesting. But she’s only gone for the last fourth of the film, and while she’s there, the term “Technicolor Noir” actually makes sense.

I once had a brother who was your age. You would have liked him very much, I think. Everybody liked him. Oh, if you could have seen him in his Hussar’s uniform, so slender and straight, with his thick chestnut hair, his bright red jacket... And his smile! Nobody could resist my brother’s smile. Not me, nor his friends, nor our father. My brother was young then, but I was just a girl, and he seemed ever so much older and wiser to me, yet always laughing. Never did he come home without a gift for me, and he always had a friendly word, a joke, a compliment. Ah, young man, there are not many your age who have the time or the patience he had with a silly little sister.

Of course, he had all the follies of youth. What young man worth anything does not? He’d always been restless in his affections, easily excited by people or by hobbies, and just as easily distracted from them. As a boy, he had once brought home a little dog he’d found somewhere, a half-grown hound that was, for awhile, his constant pet and companion. A month later it was forgotten, moping about the house because my brother no longer wanted it with him when he went out, and my father finally handed it over to the gardener’s lame son. Another time it was a bird that my brother kept in his room. Of course, it went the way of all his hobbies and became as neglected as his schoolbooks. Only the housemaids paid any mind to it at all and one autumn day one of them went in to find that my brother had left a window open in his room, the weather had grown cold, and the poor creature had shivered itself to death in its cage.

But not even my father could be angry with him for long, not when my brother was a boy, and not he was a young man. People think young girls are much more ignorant than they really are, and because I was quiet and devout, many of the servants also assumed I was deaf. But my ears were quite good, I assure you, and I heard their gossip, noticed the way the housemaids giggled when my brother’s name came up. Once there was a visit from a man in a terrible temper, one of the merchants from the capital who came into the house roaring about his daughter. He left quietly enough, however, even shook my father’s hand in the driveway before climbing back into his carriage. My family had money back then, and the man had a certain vulgar respectability. No doubt word of our father’s kindness got out, because not even a month later one of the tenants presumed to come scratching at the kitchen door expecting similar treatment and whining about some slut of a daughter who, he claimed, had been unable to outrun my brother in a field. By then my father’s patience was at an end and one of our footmen gave the man a good drubbing and threw him out.

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Prejudice is fascinating, in all its forms. Over twenty years of posting political commentary online using my own, unmistakably feminine name, for instance, has been an object lesson in how some guys respond to the female voice.

I’m not saying that every man who argues with me is guilty of sexism, but there are cases where responders seem to be struggling to figure out exactly how and where I’m being “irrational” and working themselves into quite a dudgeon about it. This comes not so much from people who disagree with me politically as from people presumably on my own side of the political aisle, guys who refer to themselves as liberals or leftists or anything other than “conservative”

For instance, there was one guy I used to debate online who, after a few messages, invariably went into what I call “therapist” mode. In discussions relating to women’s issues he’d start asking me personal questions about my relationship with my husband, or whether I like the way I look, or how I felt about the whopping psychic trauma I presumably endured from that professor I once cited in passing as an example of casual sexism. I don’t want to do this guy an injustice. I never got the sense he was stalking me, and he certainly wasn’t one of those Slobbering Yahoos who, when they sense they’re losing ground in a debate with a woman, unzip themselves and start waving it at her.

But his approach always included the apparently unshakeable assumption that my disagreement with him had to be rooted in my emotions. After a while I began to suspect that he was reacting not to what I’d actually posted, but to the fact that I was the person posting it.

I think women as a rule are aware of this undercurrent, this assumption by so many men, even those who consider themselves liberal and broad-minded, who call themselves “feminists,” that someone posting under a female name must be on some level incompetent, illogical. Almost certainly women of a certain age are aware of it. We don’t speak up about it every time we encounter it because if we did we’d end up giving ourselves ulcers, but we do know it’s there, and there’s a lot we don’t say to our male friends and acquaintances about it.

When I consider this, and I think about how African Americans or other racial minorities must perceive whites, all the things they have probably noticed about assumptions held by me and other WASPs, assumptions we’re barely aware of – when I think of all the things my black friends, acquaintances and co-workers have probably noticed but left unsaid… It makes me shudder.

“is there a Tony Snow’s tumor appreciation thread? I hope his tumor makes a full recovery from that bad case of Tony it’s got.”

From a Democratic Underground thread on Tony Snow’s apparent relapse

It’s one thing to blurt out something hateful on the spur of the moment -- to say “good” after hearing news of some personal tragedy striking a public figure you despise.

It’s another thing to sit down and write something celebrating such a tragedy, proofread it, and then hit the send button so that it’s posted on a public forum.

And it’s quite another thing to embrace hatred in this manner, and attack anyone who refuses to join in.

The current freepification of political rhetoric is understandable on an intellectual level in the same way that intoxication is understandable. We’ve all seen at some point in our lives the person who’s had a few too many and who truly believes that he or she is being funny and/or brave, and/or brilliant. Such drunks will often get belligerent with anyone who tries to get them to sit down, shut up, and eat something. And if you dare to touch their bottles or put a full glass out of their reach – well, they sometimes have to be physically restrained from smacking you. You are now officially their enemy.

Not so long ago getting drunk on hatred was mainly the province of people who posted to sites like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. Unfortunately, quite a few people on the left side of the political equation have apparently watched Freepers post on subjects like the death of Paul Wellstone, Rachel Corrie, and Marla Ruzicka, and, instead of being revolted, have been envious. “Kewel!” they’ve exclaimed. “We should do that!”

And so they ran out and bought themselves case of the same stuff, guzzled it down, and are now staggering around the blogosphere slurring their words, waving their fists, and throwing up on anyone who gets in their way. They are distinguishable from Freepers only because they insert the names of right-wingers or perceived right-wingers in the places where Freepers would insert the names of liberals or perceived liberals. And to make the spectacle truly pathetic, they seem to fondly imagine themselves as courageous defenders of their cause, tough hombres contemptuously brushing aside all those weak namby-pambys who draw the line at gloating about a man quite possibly dying from cancer.

One of the side effects of hate intoxication is a blurring of vision, an inability to perceive nuance. Objecting to their behavior is instantly interpreted as praise for the individuals they’ve attacked. “Wassamatta wid you” they ask, focusing blearily on the person who’s just objected to Hillary Clinton being called a “fucking whore” or has expressed the hope for Tony Snow’s recovery. “You some kinda big fanna Bush? You think you’re some kinda high and mighty saint?” Frequently they’ll launch into imitations, miming attempts at common decency. “Oh, geeze, poooooooor so-and-so! He just got rushed to the hospital! Ima gonna cry!” Then, “Nope!” they’ll declare triumphantly, with all the archness of that man at the end of the bar who’s had four strong martinis and thinks he’s being cute, “the tears just ain’t cummin. I’m a baaad, baaaaaaad person!”

Another symptom is a queasiness that’s at odds with the macho stance these guys frequently adopt. One minute they’re marching about unshaven, an ammo belt draped over their chest, a cigar stub clenched in their gritted teeth, railing about all those squeamish sissies who don’t courageously join in cheering some horrific personal tragedy striking either a Republican or a perceived Republican. The next minute they’re asking to be excused because, faced with the statement that the Republican or perceived Republican is a human being, Sergeant Rock’s tummy has gone all flopsie and he has to go upchuck in the bushes.

Sorry to spoil the fun guys, but you really need to lay off that stuff. It’ll kill ya. Yes, I know, while you’re on it you feel ever so tough, ever so smart and strong and brave, but that’s just an illusion.

To anyone who’s not drinking from that bottle you look as dumb, out of control, and easily manipulated as any Freeper.

Following instructions in the book accompanying my new Tarot Deck, I turned over four of the cards and made up a story. Here is the result:

I found the tomb only because I was bored and searching for something else to see. We had already visited the three entries in that section of the guidebook – the tomb of a poet, famous in his country, but never translated of course (its steps littered with cut flowers, some recent, some withered) the reputed grave of one of their female saints (notes written in German, in Czech, and in the half-forgotten native language of that region fluttered weakly in the breeze, lain on the breast of the grave and held down with little stones), and a monument to a poor lad who, fifty years ago, was inveigled by some rabble-rousing pamphleteer into doing something foolish and had been promptly shot for it. (His bust, its eyes as innocent and wide as a puppy’s, seemed to protest the vulgar wreath some recent visitor had draped over its shoulders.)

So having paid tribute twice to these notable resting places, walked a little longer, and nodded at a trio of young men with sketchpads who were on their way out, I looked around to see if one last drop of what my sister calls ‘The quaintly picturesque” could be squeezed from the scenery. It seemed doubtful. My search had brought me close to a not especially well tended section of the cemetery. The path here was almost obscured in places by the grass growing between the stones, and the tombs were so old that they plainly no longer mattered to anyone, their inscriptions weathered away, vines and brush allowed to engulf them. If it had not been the middle of warm summer day perhaps I would have derived some romance from my surroundings, but it was too hot, too bright and the vegetation brought to mind thorns and biting insects rather than the cool shade and comforting gloom of a ghost story.

But then I noticed, over the tangled pile of vines that covered one of the tombs, what looked like the jagged edge of a broken monument. There was plainly another tomb beyond that one, and yet the path did not turn in that direction. There was no path there at all, just a space between two of the overgrown tombs.

No, I was wrong, I saw, when I moved a little closer. There had been a path there once. I could make out a few stones beneath the long grass. Lifting my skirts slightly and moving carefully, I edged between the two monuments, walked a few feet and turned to my left to find the opening of a large, once impressive tomb, fronted by what had been a sort of patio but was now a flat rubble of broken, overgrown stones.

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My new tarot deck arrived yesterday. The Bohemian Gothic Tarot is now brightening up our apartment, and I am spending part of the day flipping through it and becoming familiar with the images and interpretations. They are best viewed in a strong light, because every card depicts something taking place either at night, or in twilight, or on a very overcast day somewhere in Eastern Europe early in the Twentieth Century. Or maybe on a 1930s Universal Studios set. It’s hard to say.

There’s not a single relationship depicted that’s not troubling, a single smile that isn’t sickly, or clueless, or evil, a single child who doesn’t look either imperiled or corrupt. Even the most normally cheerful cards have sinister background music. The family in the Ten of Cups consists of a mad-eyed father, an obviously frightened wife gazing up at him as she clutches a pasty-faced baby, and a dejected little girl in the background. The little blonde boy of The Sun stares and smiles at the viewer from his pony with the nasty precocity of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. He's obviously planning to frighten the governess at midnight by flying his kite in the garden.

It’s all fascinating, but it needs to be viewed under a strong light. Otherwise the details get lost in all the black, midnight blue, and ash-colored ink. The book that came with the deck assures me, for instance, that the female demoness in the Strength card is glaring at me, but I still can’t quite catch her eye, even when I hold the card next to an open window so the sun hits it directly. She keeps lounging against a very bored looking lion, flexing her leathery wings, and looking coolly over to my right.

This is a deck for readings when you’re in a really, really bad mood, have given up trying to elevate it, and are opting instead to cast a morbidly romantic veil over the fact that your apartment is a mess, your bank account is overdrawn, and your cat just died.

As a child I was addicted to scary stories. My nights were haunted by severed hands skittering around the floor on their fingers, foot long spiders on the ceiling, something called the “Bloody Bones of Hades” and, courtesy of a horror comic I once read, a semi-liquid, man-eating thing called “Mr. Green” that lived in the pattern of the throw-rug between the two beds. (Which was why dangling any of our limbs from our beds after the lights were out was ill-advised. I naturally kept my younger sister apprised of these things.)

One evening, when I was about eight, I called my mother into the bedroom to tell her that there was something in our bedroom closet. While the lights were out, and I couldn’t see it very clearly I could tell, I said in a trembling, almost tearful voice, that the closet door was swaying very slightly from side to side.

“Oh,” Mother said, “That’s just the monster that lives in your closet.”

In the stunned silence that followed, she explained that the closet door was swaying because the monster had a single eye on a large stalk, and it kept pushing against the door – she held up one hand and crooked and uncrooked her index finger to demonstrate – while he watched my sister and me.

Then she cheerfully tucked us in, kissed us goodnight, and left.

I slept soundly that night. Poisonous spiders might still lurk over our heads, Mr. Green might still blub and slurp inside his rug, and the Beast with Five Fingers might be poised to strangle me if I didn’t sleep with the covers pulled right up under my chin. But the question of what was in the closet had been answered. Mom was on top of it, and if it was okay with her, it was okay with me.

“I see you’re a fellow I can talk plainly to, Jaggar,” Waffing said in a deep, bluff voice. “A man much like myself. I like what you’re doing. As I’ve said many times myself, the only way to treat enemies of genetic purity is to smash their skulls.”
From The Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad

Linda Vester: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?


Ann Coulter: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days.
From FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6/04

So we've been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming… You know, I'll tell you what works on a crowd like this -- a machine gun, that always works very well...You must have order, you cannot have a civilized society without order and if that means cracking a few skulls, so be it. A good ole boy network is what you need and hand out some ax handles.
Chris Baker KTLK radio morning show, 4/4/08

Most of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream consists of the posthumously published novel of that famous Golden Age science fiction writer, Adolf Hitler. As any science fiction fan knows, Hitler relocated to the United States shortly after Germany won the war in 1919. His final work was the Hugo Award-winning novel and cult classic, Lord of the Swastika, a bizarre meld of hard science fiction and high fantasy that tells the story of Feric Jaggar, a genetically pure “trueman” in a post-apocalyptic world polluted with evil, foul-smelling mutants. “Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.” reads the intro. Lord of the Swastika is a retelling of the rise of the Third Reich, as filtered through the lens of an Adolf Hitler who never became chancellor of Germany.

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http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/102405/3146.pdf

Attached is a link to an autopsy, apparently obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act. It describes a 47-year-old man who died while hanging from his wrists, a gag stuffed in his mouth. He was beaten to death in Afghanistan while in American custody.

His death is listed as a homicide. That's what the American examiner put on the form, at any rate.

I can anticipate some of the rationales I'd hear if I were debating a Bush apologist. First would come the denials. It's a fake, a forgery. The ACLU is lying.

Then, if it were established that the autopsy were authentic, the justifications. He was a dirty nasty terrorist and he deserved to die horribly, smeared with feces and struggling to breathe through a gag.

Then, if it turns out he was picked up merely on suspicion, that there was no hard evidence he'd been a terrorist at all, would come the rationalizations. He was stupid to have gotten picked up in the first place. Or he probably was doing something they just didn't know about. All those people -- all those Muslims -- are terrorists at heart.

So really, we need to BEGIN with the question -- if, in fact, this autopsy were authentic -- if in fact, the man died precisely as described here, hung up like a piece of meat and beaten to death by American interrogators. If, in fact, the man turned out to be, not a terrorist, but some unfortunate who was simply picked up because somebody didn't like the way he looked --

Would it matter to you?

It's pity, but given what we've become as a country, that's where we have to start.

M has begun hitting the root beer. He purchased two gallon bottles of the stuff yesterday and is now knocking back tall glass after tall glass. This will lead to uncontrollable cleaning. He's going to be wandering all over the apartment until midnight committing neatnesses.

We also have ice cream.

Brown cows tonight.

Suddenly, after several days of unusually cool weather, it became hot. I mean that in the San Francisco sense. In the East Coast/Midwest/Southern sense it's pleasantly cool, but in San Francisco, if you can go outside after dark with bare arms and feel no urge to run inside to fetch a sweater, it's hot. At the film last night, I had to run about making sure all the windows were wide open, and even then some people left before the discussion because the room was too close.

M and I walked home afterwards through streets that were a little more crowded and lively than usual. A warm weekend night in San Francisco is almost like a snow-day in the Carolinas. Everyone seizes the day. Girls in short dresses and bare shoulders clicked past in their high heels, men walked with their ties loosened and their jackets slung over one shoulder, doors and windows were open so that music and light spilled out a little brighter and louder into the streets. Sometimes restaurants on Hyde street will turn themselves inside out, moving most of their tables onto the sidewalk, and I'll bet Twin Peaks was crowded. Normally when people go there at night for the view, they park, hop out of their car and stand there shivering in the wind for a long as they can stand it before running back to the car. On a warm, windless night, the lookout point is packed.

At about 2:00 this morning I woke up nude on top of the bedclothes and looked over the edge of the bed to see that I'd pulled off my pajamas and dropped them in a little pile on the floor. Our cat had abandoned his usual spot on our bed and was lying on top of them. When he saw me he let out a warning "mrrr" -- he was lying exactly where I'm likely to put my feet when I get out of bed -- and turned over on his back to stretch luxuriously, smiling up at me as if to say, "Isn't this wonderful?" Cats get drunk on warmth.

So now it's a blazingly beautiful day, with only a faint pale haze of our usual fog to the west, and not so much as a speck of white in the shore beyond the Golden Gate. No surf at all, that I can see. I've not gone outside yet, so I don't know whether it's still hot, but here in the apartment I can comfortably wear a sun dress from my southern days. It would have been a good day to go down to the Farmer's Market, but I'll probably just settle for a quick run to Whole Foods and a good workout on the hills. Maybe I can wear, not only one of my colorful skirts, but my favorite straw hat, and take my vanity out for of one of our increasingly rare walks.

Sad tonight. No reason, really, except that my routine was disrupted by my yearly checkup this afternoon, and the whole color of my day is off. Don't like working in the morning at the library. The light's not right in the hallway. Don't like having my afternoon free on a weekday. The light's not right out my window when I try to write. Don't like being home at 5:00 and eating dinner so early. Don't like it getting dark outside. Not enough windows are lit in the buildings down the street. This day wasn't done right, and I want a do-over. Don't like, don't like, don't like...

No angst, no agony. Just a little sad.