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May 6, 2013 - April 29, 2013

Friday, July 06, 2012

LAKE TOLD YOU I'D BE BACK. So it's been hot, and this household was without power for nearly five days and nights. It wasn't the heat that did us in; it was the derecho, a recurring phenomenon that usually strikes in the midwest more than the midatlantic. Thunderstorms that act like hurricanes of thunderstorms. We took pictures you probably don't want to see, so they're not here. I've asked Lake to explain what all this doesn't have to do with Global Warming, and he has promised to find some time in his fully committed schedule to do so. I thank him for that, as well as for filling in like lightning (pun intended) with a post I couldn't key myself but only describe on my iPhone on the porch. Kudos to Brizoni for posting it promptly and flawlessly.

Another big thank you to the tireless soldiers of the Atlantic City Electric Company. Somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 South Jersey residents were shut down by the derecho storms. From the first, the trucks kept going by on their way to trying to fix the catastrophe. Unlike their Con-Ed counterparts in New York, they didn't seize the occasion to threaten a strike. They did everything possible to rescue us from the isolation, darkness, dread, and dry plumbing that accompanied the 98 degree, un-air-conditioned heat. I was never mad at them once. I saw their trucks everywhere in our shut-down town, and I knew it would take longer to hunt down the demons and gremlins that complicated the rural blackouts.

My only victory was convincing my wife to decamp to safer ground. I grew up with heat as bad as this, on exactly this same terrain. She hasn't the constitution for it. Heat punishes her more than it does me, and I feared for her life. I stayed because we presently have no means of conveying all the dogs in one vehicle at one time. The State of New Jersey has just made it illegal at a thousand bucks a pop to transport dogs without "dog safety belts," which in the case of sighthounds can result in hanged dogs. For the same reason that you can't give them leads attached to stakes in the ground. Their explosive acceleration breaks their necks.

So it was me and the dogs and cats and the heat and the darkness. More than that, the stillness. Opening windows doesn't help. There is no breeze when the air is a heavy, oppressive blanket. I had my iPhone and a car to charge it with, a battery-powered radio, and the experience of being a marsh rat native. I laughed off the help offered by my/our friends and my wife's family up north, who were concerned about me. I chuckled when one of the wittier among them observed the irony of being powerless less than three miles from a nuclear power plant whose plume of steam we watch every day. I thought I was prepared for the vigil.

But I wasn't really. When you're truly married, parsimonious, battery-saving texting isn't enough. When the iPhone is no longer hooked to wifi, it gets slow and suddenly there's only one bar, which makes distance somehow a killer. Conversations with my wife broke up. Texting was the only recourse. I drained my entire battery trying to send one picture of my Bengal cat to a friend in Ohio who was trying to kid me into a better mood. Worse, the home that is your chief comfort becomes a gray memory of itself. All its life functions have stopped. It does not tick, hum, illuminate, or warm. Yes, I said warm. Stifling, airless heat is not warmth. It's a kind of arrest. The animals sense it. They hunker down in hushed alarm. They know something is wrong, most of all with you. Because they realize, maybe more than you do, that the physical ability to withstand such conditions is not entirely about experience. They know, they see, they smell that your stamina is not what it needs to be. They can feel your batteries fading too fast.

This isn't resentment or self-pity. It's context. Driving home the fact that I'm getting old. This was nothing like the ordeals of those who man the outposts in Afghanistan or Iraq. They're brave, resolved, and heroic. I was just experiencing a solemn, and too utterly still, confrontation with my own mortality. Despite all the lies you tell yourself about what kind of man you still are, you might not actually be up to this middling ordeal.

What did I do? I listened to SportsTalk radio in Philadelphia. Continuously. All day long, all night long, even when I was nominally sleeping. What can I tell you? Karl Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the masses. Sports is. While the Mainstream Media and the New Media were relentlessly chewing over the SCOTUS decision on ObamaCare, SportsTalk was even more relentless in chewing over the sorry plight of the Philadelphia Phillies. At times I thought it was such madness that I mulled turning off the radio, but the illusion of connectedness has become our new cultural mania, and I am as afflicted with that as I have always been with all the sins of my age. I did not want to endure the silence of no voice talking at me in the darkness.

So much of what goes on anymore is talking for the sake of talking, listening for the sake of not feeling utterly alone. The truth behind Facebook and Twitter and texting and the vulgar chatter of sitcoms and romcons and reality TV and 24/7 cable news.

Lowpoints. I listened to the ultimate radio whore Michael Smerconish waxing irate about Penn State, even though I know his whole mind would fit in my vest pocket. He's a man of isolated obsessions -- the Mumia case, killing bin Laden (which caused him to endorse Obama over McCain after a career as a Republican functionary and become, since, a leftist apologist in an endlessly disgraceful process of self-justification), and now Penn State. I read on my Kindle, while it lasted, almost half a novel by one Michael Walsh, co-founder apparently of of Breitbart's Big Journalism site, with the result that I have experienced in the past week every conceivable (and I must say repellent) sin against good writing by someone who is supposedly on my side politically. I discovered that the iPod, which I belatedly discovered was fully charged, brought no comfort of any kind; when there was decent FM radio, the real thrill was sharing the experience of listening to music you liked with all those others in the radio audience. It's hollow when it's only you and you know it.

Then the power came back on and I emerged from the prison of semi-solitary confinement. My thoughts.



One more thing. Night always HAS pushed up day. It's possible I'll have more thoughts later. Why I'm not as popular as I think I ought to be.

FASTER THAN THE MAN WITH NO NAME. I asked Lake for an explanation, which he sent me approximately 15 seconds after I asked for it. The rest of this is him.

ED. ADDENDUM: The missus came home, full of reminders that heat and volatile summer weather and sex are nothing new but in fact eternal. Some examples:





Well, it goes on and on. And on. But the new Occupy the Millennium dream is different, isn't it? Lots of copulating and no babies and no passion -- er, no heat. Let's all be as cool as the surgical instruments used to extract the unfortunate by-products of what prior generations might have called romance and you call "hooking up." Good luck to you with that.

Global Warming? I hardly think so. Global Freezer Burn is more like it.

The earth you kids will inherit isn't worth inheriting. Whatever Fahrenheit you choose to measure.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

This is Lake, posting by proxy for RL. He called me this afternoon and described Friday's storm as the worst he'd even seen, and now his power, water, everything are out until at least this Friday. Mrs. RL consented to staying with a relative, so RL is now sitting in the hot darkness, getting scowled at by sighthounds and thinking about the Supreme Court decision.

Thank God for the iPhone, which he can charge in his car. He's not completely cut off, so he was able to relay the outline of this post to me. It's an extended metaphor, an apt analogy for the current stakes in the coming battle for nothing less than the future of civilization.

The year was 1914, 98 years ago last week. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination causes European diplomacy to fall to hell, and the stage is set for The Great War (before we knew enough to number them, as the saying goes). Two countries, France and Germany, with two plans. France's Plan XVII set out to strike a dagger into Alsace and Lorraine, leaving Paris undefended. Germany, meanwhile, enacted the Schlieffen Plan (which Hitler later plagiarized with devastating results). They sliced through Belgium to approach Paris from the North and West. Within weeks, the French were repelled and back where they started. As the Germans hit the Belgian border to sweep into France, they were met by seven French armies and some British divisions. With Britain's later full support, Paris came to be defended and the battle lines were drawn from the North Sea to the Swiss border.

Thus, the Western Front, one of the most horrific battlegrounds in history. Generals with 19th century battle plans and a knowledge of the US Civil War were armed with 20th century weapons -- machine guns, tanks, mustard gas. 15 million lives were chewed up in the war that neither side wanted to continue. Of course, we now know it as the preliminary movements leading to World War II, Hitler, the Bomb, all of it.

As RL painted the picture for me, reminding me of this history as my high school teachers never could, he referenced Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, a detailed description of the events and a deep analysis of the "misconceptions, miscalculations, and mistakes" that wrought the atrocious war. The Wiki page is detailed and serves as an excellent primer.

So this is the analogy. The Supreme Court decision to uphold Obamacare touched off powder kegs on both sides, with each claiming some kind of victory. Obama popped his head up to acknowledge the "win," but he must see that he's in deep trouble over this when it comes to the election. Battle lines are being drawn, and this is one we *can't* afford to lose, much like the Allies in the trenches of the Western Front.

What InstaPunk has been saying right here for the last four years.

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