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Monday, January 24, 2011

DOWN HOME. Something I've never talked about before. Yeah, we live in the nowhere of the American east coast. Way out in the country. But we're also in the flightpath that leads miltary aircraft from offshore to Dover, Delaware, where all the slain warriors come home. We hear them first, we see them if we rush to the windows, and we feel them when the Chinooks beat-beat-beat their way across our sky. For years we have imagined without voicing it the transmigration of souls across our patch of sighthounds, cardinals, nuthatches, hummingbirds and red-breasted woodpeckers. We thought it was for a purpose. Defending Americans against those who would do us in for being us. I just learned today from an old friend that there is no such thing as American exceptionalism. So it's all for naught. There is more virtue in being French or German, because they at least have the health care questions answered right. And there was never anything unique about America except a certain vulgar energy.

All right. I'm swallowing my ire. American freedom includes the perfect right to the insanity of the smug and the superciliously ignorant consumers of American freedom who adopt the guise of being as superior as European intellectuals like Kant and Rousseau. A philosophy in which art is actually more important than life and belief. A philosophy that grinds the best of us into the potions loaded into egalitarian hypodermic needles injected into the corn-fed masses by the smartest technicians among us. (Uh that would be the scant 100 graduates a year of the Harvard Medical School, who along with the graduates of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard {if not Yale} Law School, and don't forget the Columbia School of Journalism, should be running absolutely fucking everything in the country.)

But we live in the country. There are no streetlights here. We do not live in the piss-yellow bubble of the city but in the wide blue universe, where night is shocking moon and bright pinpoint stars and, yes, the darkness of night as it is. Meaning dark as death except for the twisted thrusts of clawing winter trees. And I am angry.

There are philosophies of life and philosophies of death. We feed the birds in the snow and we hear the C130s and Chinooks beating overhead. And somehow we're the benighted ones. As if we're the ones who don't know the value of human life and need the addicts of thanatos to tell us how corrupt we are. People whose whole lives are defined by politics to tell us that we are "too emotional" about politics.

Because we're somehow too stupid to distinguish mere politics from the governmental policies that have already cost us family members -- like watching my mother ping-ponging between hospital and rehab according to Medicare-determined regulations until she died -- while the enlightened ones tell us what's wrong with health care is not enough government control, as if -- AS IF -- government hasn't been fatally interfering with health care since 1964 and the only solution is more government control. And who would know more about enlightened government control than Germans? Or maybe the French.

I'm told, by my superior friend, that all this is the fault of corrupt Republicans in congress. I agree. Republicans in congress helped vote in Medicare. Which cost 20 times what it was originally projected to cost. What did we gain? Trillions in debt. What did we lose? Doctors in Buicks who made house calls. Now I'm supposed to blame Republicans who oppose all change because more change might make things worse by changing things for the sake of changing things. Kind of like a Hail Mary pass by atheists. How could any intelligent person believe such nonsense?

And I'm the idiot. I'm also the one who doesn't know what he's talking about because all he's lost is an old mother and various friends and acquaintances with whom he can't claim a blood relation. Which means I don't have the necessary "Oh my God, how could you?" claim in congress or on the government.

BEAT BEAT BEAT. Yeah, You're right. I know nothing about death. But maybe I know more about life than you remember.

P.S. You're exactly like my sister. You'll never look at this, explore my Glossary, or acknowledge its weight. (Like her, you start, engage, then disappear. It's called glancing acknowledgment with no accountability. She praises, promises to read more, then whoosh....)  Vassar and Dartmouth must have the same zipcode. I have accepted that my commenters for the most part have no sense of humor, but I've always been more Ambrose than Scott, with a flick of Swinburne in between. The chief distinguishing characteristic of my intimates is their determination not to notice.

Commenters: Don't be upset. I have long accepted that laughter is no part of my charter with you. Why I've given up doing posts that are just funny. You ignore them completely. All I'll tell you, in passing, is that laughter is far more important than you know. Here, for example, I'm talking to a person of sparkling wit who has utterly forgotten how to laugh. That's a kind of death, which makes a mockery of life. But if you don't read my Glossary and have something to say beyond the fact that you want to restate it as if you thought of it first, then I'm going to write about the Super Bowl EVERY SINGLE DAY until you cry uncle.

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