Acharit HaYamim

Just finished reading The Corrections by Franzen. At page 100 it was an effort on behalf of literature and self-betterment to continue. At 200, pushed onward by a spark of interest and hope. 300 passed uneventfully. At 400 commitment was overpowering curiosity, and by 500 it was mindless. 600 was knowledge mixed with desperation, a chunky appreciation of Franzen's prowess and ego welded to the need to have earned the right to simply close the cover the backwards way. Then I did; I had. The verdict? Uneven, and showing the strain of balancing all character and little plot. But a technical masterpiece, which I appreciate if nothing else as a literary engineer.

It’s hot. I can’t tell if the air in my place is stagnant or just absent. Our bedroom – our whole apartment - is the attic of an old brownstone, where the servants used to swelter until the bell would ring from below. Maybe the windows back then were sealed shut, so as to induce a torpor in the lower classes. It prevents revolution. Regardless, even with the windows open wide to the bus traffic and bickering teenagers on Bergen Street, the air squats in place with a wet, soupy quality. It’s kind of like the oxygen has been replaced by space ether, pumped in by beings more tropical and cunning than we. Collectors ballooning the atmosphere of a butterfly dome with chloroform. I don’t mind it, actually, but it creates a feeling of disembodiment that I imagine is common in sleep study centers, even if it’s probably nine degrees warmer here. Floating and trapped under a weight at the same time. It’s also late on a Sunday. The liminal point in time when, leaving Venus and bending towards Mars, the sun sets on all the day’s verbs, changing them to disquieting adjectives of discontent.

At least the couch is gone. It sat there in the back of the office, a remnant of my singledom, taking up needed newspaper storage space and being hated by my wife. Not so much me – I thought it was functional and not unattractive, covered in sleek black pleather that bespoke a cool, stylish aura my bachelorhood never had.. But she felt that its size and blackness distracted from the mental calm she needs to product her long, thoughtful essays about hip hop and prison and the Middle East. It’s leaving became a point of near-obsession, something that grew in the crawlspace of her mind, slowly nibbling into the healthy tissue responsible for note-taking and typing and discussions with her editor until 60% off sales and warehouse outlets emitted a clarion call that deafened. The woman who bought it – a couple actually – drove an hour and twenty minutes from Connecticut to pick it up. They said it was going to be shipped to their summer home in Michigan. Our posting on Craigslist was clear – we were offering a seventy-five dollar, scratched up futon that could certainly be purchased at a strip mall up there, so it made no sense to us at all; the purchase or the summer house shipment or the couple themselves. She – Susan! - was bubbly in a way that wasn’t off-putting, just a nice woman delighted by her remarkable find of our generic, mass-produced, ubiquitously-available junk. She called down out of our window – up here! Apartment three! Yes, on the third floor! – to someone below. He turned out to be an older, ophthalmologist-looking gentleman who seemed unhappy, no doubt at the preposterousness of the entire scenario. We guessed that this was one of a number of insanities that Stanley (or whatever his name actually was; he pointedly did not say hello) accepted in the relationship. The thrill of finding a sucker initially brought out the worst in us (did they want, say, our old toaster for $200?), until the inequality of the transaction slowly shamed us into silence. But ultimately, there was nothing we could say. Everyone knows where Michigan is, and what kind of furniture is available at Crate and Barrels across the country, so we just floated on the tide of Commerce, accepting Stanley’s money and frustration at the price he has to pay for getting perky Susan to live with him.

That said, the moment they left, Samantha’s glee became unseemly. A jig, performed to the new and original composition entitled “I’m In A Great Mood, Bitches!” made me smile, and reminds me why I love her, despite her jihad against my possessions.

So the couch is gone, the wife is happy, the apartment less cluttered. But as I said, it’s still hot. Maybe we’ll go out for ice-cream. On Stanley.

It is boring, I know, to keep noting the increasing number of times that the anti-Israel media is willing to simply chuck the thin veneer of "objective" news reportage and jump right into the jihad. But I bring you these nuggets not to highlight their predictable-yet-somehow-still-mind-blowing hostility and factual imbalance. Rather, it is simply so that someone, somewhere notes its occurence. 

Their ability to show contempt is truly impressive.  Try this for fun - go to the Air France website to check the status of an incoming flight. Type in airfrance.com. You will be redirected to airfrance.fr.  Because instead of using the .com site to cater to their English-speaking customers, the goal is to make absolutely no allowance for the fact that the, for lack of a better term, lingua franca of the internet is...English.  Instead, they have decided it is far more important that you visit the general website and bow to the Frenchness which you foolishly don't possess.  

If you, like me, have been wondering about the makeup of the Milky Way recently (and I knows you have) this is a pretty enlightening four minutes.

Today I played croquet in the park. This is the first time I have actually played a full game, according to rules not made up by me at the moment. It is an interesting pastime. The chief joy is obviously in thwacking the balls through the hoops, that basic phallic pillar of most popular sports. But it is the essentially English nature of it that is fascinating. On the surface, all is gentlemanly and civilized. There is lawn, deliberation, sauntering. Frequently, tea and whitebread sandwiches with no crusts. Perhaps, in the background, a swan. It is all very unhurried, and no one, I am guessing, from Queen Victoria on down has ever broken a sweat in a game. But underneath lurks a zero-sum framework that is built around crushing the position and hopes of fellow competitors, usually just when victory seems within reach. The various strategies that seem most successful - pounding others' balls into the stratosphere, blocking everyone's path, turning your ball into "poison" - frequently result in a weird undercurrent of vindictiveness and hostility overlaid with the forced gaity required by the sunny innocence of the game's exterior. Still an all, it was a nice day in the park, and when I next play I am going to double roquet those bitches into next week.

It's sad when you take a break from something you once enjoyed and respected only to return and find its current iteration so unimpressive and disappointing that you immediately understand that it has not just degraded over time, but that in reality it never rose to the level you thought, and you had been blinded by some minor aspect of its (now less understandable) appeal.

For me this happened recently with Instapundit and Powerline, two of the 5 or 6 political blogs I used to read regularly. I was, for a long while, of the opinion that the level of discourse and insight on the Right wing of the blogosphere was generally superior to that on the Left, despite the fact that I disagreed with many of their fundamental approaches and conclusions. It seemed like there was much more of the "so is your mother!" level of argument emanating from the Left, and because of my desire for actual analysis and rational application of logic to pressing political questions, I am willing to accept some degree of open bias in commentators (in whichever direction) as long as they give me something of substance to think about. These two blogs were specifically appealing in part because they are written by lawyers, and I both am and think like one.

Which is why it is painful to return to them after a few-month hiatus (got bored, other things to do, etc.) to find that, in fact, they are both just simple knee-jerk organs of partisan hackery. Worse, their onetime saving grace - a self-proclaimed devotion to intellectual rigor - is so markedly absent that I find myself angry not over their slavish application of conservative principles, but their abandonment of those principles in the service of mindlessly supporting the Republican party against the Democrats, come what may.

As an Independent, I have been a strong supporter of Obama from the beginning because I felt like he alone among the potential presidential candidates was able to actually give credit where it was obviously due across the aisle - to Reagan, to aspects of the 1994 congressional "revolutionaries", to the hard choices being made in the struggle with Islamic terrorism - without losing his principles or pandering. He seemed, basically, like an intelligent, principled, courageous adult. And after 7+ years of the Bush administration, it was this quality that I felt was most important in our next President. Not surprisingly, then, my second choice (over all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats) was McCain, as he seemed to be the only other politician of any stripe willing to actually say things that were obvious but politically unpalatable. So even though I strongly disagree with him on the war and the judiciary and a host of other topics, I am not one of those threatening to move to France if he gets elected. It is exciting that we finally have a choice between people who represent unpsychotic conservatism and not unhinged liberalism, despite their flirtations with representatives of both those groups.

So when I go trolling the web I am looking for nuanced, thoughtful opinion that will help illuminate the differences between these two adults championing these two great philosophies. Which is what makes the crap currently flowing from the esteemed law professors on the right so very, very disappointing. I understand that Glenn Reynolds has become obsessed with his own importance in relation to the "mainstream media", which he is ever more convinced is a frenzied hive of anti-Republican conspirators. But I was hoping that on the Biden choice he would have some kind of, y'know, insight. Instead what we get is 24 hours of nonstop posts hammering home how Biden is a horrible, awful, terrible choice, and one that only proves everything damning Reynolds has been saying (or implying via plausible deniability, since he rarely stops linking to actually say anything himself) about Obama's own horrible awful terribleness. Not because Biden is insanely anti-war (he's not) or has no foreign policy experience (he does) or because he's too young (he's old). Those are the damnations Reynolds was going to use on Kaine or Bayh or whoever else Obama may have picked. Because, you see, anyone Obama picks is by definition the worst choice, one that shows his weakness/inexperience/overconfidence/lack of confidence etc. and, frankly, a terrible person because they are his running mate and also a terrorist communist Marxist atheist foreign agent criminal Democrat. Same shit over at Powerline, which has turned into a swamp of unremitting smarm and scorn about every single thing Obama is, does and says, double standards be damned. They are currently raking Obama over the coals for daring - daring! - to say that we may want to consider our recent history when upbraiding other countries for choosing invasion over negotiation. Traitor! Moron! And proof that Obama is, and I quote, "unqualified to be a middle-manager in a well-run company, let alone President of the United States." Wow. Thanks for the insight, guys. Maybe I'll head over to DailyKos for some ranting about how McCain eats black children for breakfast.

I'd like to think that this level of thoughtless, centerless, endless bile will end after the election, but it's pretty clear that this is the new level of discourse from the Right, one that matches the worst excesses of the loony Left and leaves an Independent looking for insight with nowhere to go.