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February 5, 2012

Tag: heart

January 21, 2012

The Annotated Ann Coulter: Volume I

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Concerned citizens have debated the Ann Coulter question for many years now.  Does Coulter sincerely believe in the often ridiculous positions she champions in print, on Fox news, and during her campus lecture tours?  Or, as many have suggested, is Coulter an ongoing “performance” project of some kind, a hyperbolic parody of conservative anger and illogic dreamed up by a conceptualist collective somewhere in the Village?  Rachel Maddow has recently attempted to make this same “art school” argument about GOP pizza magnate and freelance genital inspector Herman Cain, but in truth, it is Coulter who first compelled left-leaning cultural elites to contend with the enigmatic posturing of feckless fascism.  So, for example, when Coulter claimed after the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that there now exists “burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine,” baffled bystanders could only wonder at her motivation.  Regardless of one’s position on nuclear energy, no one would really take a “pro-meltdown” position, would they? Talk about seeing the glowing silver lining around a hazy cloud of Cesium-137– this has to be a stunt, right?  Ultimately, however, Coulter’s “intent” in her books and punditry is not all that important.  Be it sincere or a sham, the effect on American culture and politics remains the same.  If you want to drink from a mountain stream, after all, it matters little if a horse up river pissed in the water by design or by accident; either way, you still have a mouth full of horse piss.

On the other hand, if Coulter’s act really is a bluff, and she in fact spends all her free time in Manhattan clinking cocktails with book editors, gallery curators, and a few cynical but discrete Ivy League professors, laughing about the endless gullibility of the stupid hayseeds who are paying for her new walk-in jacuzzi–then don’t we owe it to her miserable captives to set them free?  If, back in 1964, I had been struggling to sit through all 8 hours of Warhol’s Empire, I know I would certainly have appreciated it if someone had come into the theater to let me know it was okay to leave, that I was just a prop in the execution of someone else’s conceptual stunt.

Perhaps those of us who identify with progressive causes would benefit by digging a bit deeper, by subjecting Coulter’s oeuvre to a more sustained and probing form of textual explication.  By “deconstructing,” if you will, the logic of the Coulterian universe, there is a chance–a slim one, I will concede–that we might better understand, a). what she professes to believe; b). whether or not she really believes what she professes to believe; and c). the sensibility of a readership that truly believes that she believes in things that she may or may not actually believe.

The only way to do this, I propose, is through a line-by-line examination of the work itself–what we in the academic game sometimes call a “close reading.”  As a slanderous, treasonous, godless, guilty, and demonic member of the professorial class, I hope that I might be well-suited to such a task. In the interest of critical self-reflexivity, I will admit up front that I think she’s probably faking it, that she doesn’t really believe most of the positions she advocates (like carrying heavy water for the “pro-meltdown” community).  But I am willing to keep an open mind, and if somehow Coulter can win me over with the strength of her arguments, I will be more than happy to concede that she is correct and that my “liberal” ass deserves immediate incarceration for crimes against the state, at least until it arrives at its final destination in hell where Coulter and other heavenly conservatives can pelt me and my fellow damned with burning copies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Let us begin with Coulter’s fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).  Though the title remains confrontational (it implies, you see, that talking to a liberal is so unpleasant that one would do everything in his or her power to avoid such a fate), I begin here because this book suggests, at least implicitly, that some type of dialogue might still take place (at least as of 2004, the date of the book’s original publication).  Admittedly, in Coulter’s ideal form, this “dialogue” would be a Thanksgiving dinner wherein a witty “conservative” systematically decimates the sophistry of her uptight liberal relations by demonstrating that there is no problem in the 21st century that can not be answered by some creative combination of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Jesus.  To put a positive spin on this otherwise depressing scenario, let us emphasis that this scene at least has us all sitting at the same table, as it were, and that if Coulter’s woefully naive young cousin doing an Anthro degree at Smith began choking to death on the ceremonial wishbone, she still might have enough empathy to get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver (then again, perhaps Coulter really does have the courage to commit an unparalleled act of pure Objectivism:  No one help her!  It is not in our interest to prevent this lazy, under-achieving masticator from choking, for her death shall leave more turkey and stuffing for the rest of us!  Turn the highchairs this way so that the babies might also learn this lesson well!)

So let us begin (Coulter’s prose will be in bold black, my annotations in red).
 
A special note to conservative readers: Given that modern American conservatism has now become indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, there will be no attempt made here to “persuade” or “convince” you of anything.  Rather, much as one might address a co-worker who suddenly professes a belief that extraterrestrials are filling his head with voices telling him to kill the neighbor’s dog, the following will proceed from the assumption that logic and reason are of little use in convincing you of anything, and that your best hope resides in a carefully monitored regimen of Haldol or Thorazine. I’m so sorry.  If somehow appeals to cooperative reason and socio-economic justice prevail in the future, we will try to send a time machine back to rescue the rest of you from yourselves.  Until then, good luck.  Also, I think someone on your local public access station just suggested adding a penny in sales tax to help clean up that toxic dump site that’s been festering out by the Johnson place and breeding all them mutant super-raccoons—your time might be better spent writing a letter about how the free market is the only way to deal with the mutant super-raccoon problem, and that you’ll shoot any city animal control officer who comes on your property to implement a socialist “one-size-fits-all” campaign of mutant super-raccoon eradication. 

1How to Talk to a Liberal
(1) Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents’ home, get a job, and start paying taxes.

Coulter begins here with a touch of folk wisdom, essentially adapting Churchill’s bromide, “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,” so that it might better appeal to her most loyal readers (crucially, however, Coulter is not willing to concede the 20 year-old part of the equation.  Even deciding to share your toys in preschool would be counted as a moronic flirtation with wealth redistribution).  Conservatives love using this quotation because they believe it imbues the speaker with a type of practical philosophy born of hard-won experience and incontrovertible common sense.  By dropping it into everyday conversation, the conservative signals that he or she possesses the necessary intellectual depth to reflect on life’s big questions, but still has not been swayed by the more “complicated” book-learned philosophies favored by liberal elites. 
Unpacking the sentence, we see three interlinking assumptions:
1. Liberals are children.2. Liberals are unemployed.3. Liberals do not pay taxes.
By casting the liberal as a child who will, under ideal circumstances, be “cured” by confronting the more sober truths of adulthood, Coulter endorses the rather sad but protoypically conservative position that the world is what it is and nothing will ever change it.   Only children believe that the world’s inequalities and injustices might be productively challenged.  The “adult” conservative, on the other hand, knows how the world “really works,” and that the child-liberal will eventually understand that s/he must give up the ridiculous aspiration for a world that is less horrifying.   Most often, this “adult” perspective is the product of having been worn down by age, fear, and fatigue so that no other possibilities remain imaginable.  A mortgaged and mirthless 40 sees what carefree 20 cannot–life is an endless struggle to acquire shit and protect it from other people who want to take your shit, all so that when you get really old you don’t end up dying penniless in a ditch.  Thus it has been since Thog the caveman first suckered-punched Grunda the hill person so that he might steal his woman, jaguar paw, and pointed stick.
By choosing to open her 2004 book with a generational mapping of right and left, Coulter gives us some insight into her core readership.  While I have no empirical data to back this claim up, I am willing to follow Coulter’s lead here in baseless speculation to suggest that her books are most avidly consumed by white men who are married, middle-aged, and fairly well-off (given that this is the key constituency of the Republican party, this would not be surprising).  Why this particular demographic?  Because Coulter “gets” them, she understands the frustration of being a “wealth-producer” surrounded by parasitical sucklings–the wife, the kids, an idiot brother, the city, the state, public education, tollways, welfare deadbeats, the chronically ill, and so on.  Thus the appeal of the regressive Randian fantasy of holding one’s breath and refusing to “produce” so as to teach all the ungrateful morons around you a lesson (much as the toddler will withhold feces during toilet training as a way of protesting the oppressive discipline of the parents).  
Yes, Coulter–or at this point, “Ann”–truly understands the middle-class white guy’s pain.  She arrived on the national scene during the dark days of the Clinton presidency, a Godsend as the most vocal in a new battalion of younger, blonder, female Republicans who at last showed the world that not every right-winger had to look and talk like Robert Novak.  Prominently unattached, Ann is the kind of gal you fantasize about while putting on your cleats to play the back nine at the country-club.  Unlike your mollycoddling wife, Ann would understand the horror of having your oldest son come home from college to announce his plans to be a professional “graphic novelist,” or seeing your daughter go out every weekend with a trio of pierced weirdos who are most obviously homosexuals.  Ann knows what it’s like to have your hard-earned pay taxed by an evil bureaucracy that wants to throw that money away on the prostitutes and drug dealers you sometimes think you see loitering around as you drive to the baseball stadium downtown. And with Ann by my side, I would never lose an argument ever again.  Next time that wise ass liberal neighbor of mine points out that I’m much more likely to get shot by my own gun than to shoot a burglar, Ann would be right there to call him out for the dickless coward he really is!  In fact, I wouldn’t mind if she called me a few names as well.  Don’t get me wrong–I still think it is the man’s role to take the lead in any relationship.  But when I see Ann in that tight, little leather vest…I don’t know, suddenly I want her to get mad at me.  Really, really mad.  I want her to tell me what a worthless weakling I am.  I want her to yell at me for nicking the upholstery in the Beamer.  I want her to lock me in the bathroom with just bread and water until I work up the courage to go tell off those pricks at the Sanitation department for cracking our new trash bins, just because they’re too lazy to put them back down gently (and I pay there goddamn salaries with my taxes!).  And then I want Ann to hold me as I cry and cry.  Why has the world become so scary and why don’t I understand anything anymore?  How could anyone be against a flat tax, Ann, I just don’t get it–it’s so obviously and objectively fair to everyone.  What do you mean you found a picture of Ashley’s vagina on her cell phone?  Why would she do that?  I don’t care what anyone says, Ann, this democracy will only really work as long as white people are in the majority. 

And so on.
It would seem explicating the first line of Coulter’s book has taken more time and space than I anticipated, so perhaps this is a good place to stop for now.  See you next time…maybe.  I can’t decide if it’s really worth it or not.
Editor’s Note: I would also like to note that in googling the phrase “annotated Ann Coulter,” I discovered another site that had this idea long before me.  You might want to visit them as well (here).





 

January 21, 2012

"I Had Sex with Hitler and then Almost Fed His Brain to a Condor"

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If you’re like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin.  Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler’s brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host!   Most likely, “Hitler” is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry.  Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry’s recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago.  Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties–only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations.  It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day.  But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about.  The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule.  For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to “sell” the illusion of functional decapitation.
Happily for lovers of historical drama,  the saga of Hitler’s itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment.  In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler’s brain to remain at liberty,  giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).
I have now read Puccetti’s book.  Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this:  The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible.  How it hasn’t already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book.  The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be–but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino’s lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film.  If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.
We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s.  A young man–his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like–has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes.  An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier’s condition from afar–for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler.  Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:
Ten or so years after the end of WWII,  Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of….Hitler!  Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man’s bedside to hear a startling confession: “I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler’s brain!”  Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer’s personal medical team.  He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.
First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there.  Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible.  But this turns out not to the be the case.  Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he’s unearthed the entrance.  After shimmying down the vent, he’s the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war.  What’s down there?  Junk, mostly.  It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler’s bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it.  He checks out the conference room.  Nothing.  Eva Braun’s bedroom.  Nothing.  He’s just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler’s bedroom to… a secret surgical theater! 
Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!).  Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn’t quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating.  Karl continues his search for evidence.  His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor.  Bingo! It’s a brain!  
Hitler’s brain?  Well, no, actually–Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride.  This was some particularly good writing, I thought.  Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945.  With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain–a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull!  There’s also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn’t end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.
Karl’s investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager.  Karl is flabbergasted.  Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class.  That just about seals it.  Find Tager find Hitler’s brain, he reasons.  And then he can kill them both!
After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain.  Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists?  Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach–he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above).  That might seem crazy, but Karl’s plan is actually a bit more complicated.  After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl’s hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days.  And this is precisely what happens.  After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his “old friend” that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck–that’s why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably. 
One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet–but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep.  Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.
Later, once he’s completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping.  But still no sign of Hitler’s noodle.
Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl’s door.  The Baroness has requested a private audience.  Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other’s clothes.  And then this happens:



Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit.  Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.


Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness.  The story continues.

Gerda’s eyes opened widely now.  The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night…Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull.  Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry. 
      ‘ICH BIN DER FUHRER.’

Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler– a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully). 
Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler’s part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman.  Funny thing about that–it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer.  Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler’s brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication.  The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body.  Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up.  But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness.  Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.
But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler.  “What would I do,” wonders the reader, “under such circumstances?”  Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal “mindfuck” and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.
For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound.  He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out.  Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle’s foundations.  Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater!  No sooner have you killed Hitler’s host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body.  Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story.  Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell. 
You’re probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler’s brain.  Makes sense.  Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl–that’s certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here.  But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions.  Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode “harness” in Karl’s brain.  In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one.  Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl’s actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc.  This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently.  Bouncing Hitler’s brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager’s real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull!  We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology–he chose to ride Hitler’s coattails only because Hitler seemed–at the time at least– the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true.  He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be.  That’s just how evil Tager is–the pure evil of pure science.
After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube.  There he devises a brilliant plan.  He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain.  At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation.  Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass–so hard that he blacks out.  When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked–there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently).  Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.
But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons.  No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out.  But how?  Who will do the delicate surgery?  Karl.  Karl will do the surgery.  Karl will do the surgery on himself.  Brain surgery.  Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.
Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible?  I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness.  As for Karl…well, who cares really?  I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler’s devious brain.  I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.
Back to the brain surgery.  Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head.  “The scalp was easy,” Karl tells us.  Then the skull bone.  Then the membrane covering the brain.  Underneath are the electrodes.  Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences.  But the suspense isn’t over:

There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.  


To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation.  Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw.  But there he remains, his brain still exposed to “raw air” and all of his brain juice about to spill out.  He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place.  After that he’s so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he’ll deal with that after he’s finished killing Tager and finding Hitler’s new cranial hideaway.
Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the “vault”–the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle.  Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler’s pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host.  As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle’s Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl’s bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier).  Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope.  Thrust and parry.  Thrust and parry.  And then Karl spies an “Auto-Destruction” button on the wall.  It’s true.  He really does.  A big red button that will blow everything up.  Even if Karl can’t escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler’s brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!  

Karl pushes the button.  No, you fool! screams Tager.  Ten minutes to absolute annihilation.  Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision.  Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer’s brain!  Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager “in the crotch” all the way back to the pelvis.  Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood.  Hitler’s brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up. 
Karl must escape–the castle is still going to blow at any second.  Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below.  Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes.  A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy.   But no dice.  Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air.  There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler’s brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away.  For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler’s stupid evil brain–snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors.  Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding.  In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and “collapses” it good and flat.  
Victory!
Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day.  The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn’t know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman’s body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler’s brain to a hungry condor?  Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl–the sun is setting and it’s time to go back home.  Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day.  “Why not?”the nurse responds, “visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone.”
And there we leave it.  Karl might be crazy.  Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis.  I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?

January 17, 2012

The Peculiar Arab Chronicles: Love and Defecation by Nour Ali Youssef

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Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or Bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
— William Shakespeare

- – -

So in short, love is that thing that obliges you to pretend to respect opposing views, wear deodorant, and fight your gag reflex to watch a movie not of your liking for a special someone.

Love is one of the few default elements in life… much like defecation. You need it for the general satisfaction of your nether region. Some have the good fortune of a healthy bowel movement. Others have constipation and genuine resentment towards those who are doing it so regularly.

Why me? They must wonder, as they write sad songs about love’s painful absence, because while they’re spending the night home alone with a homemade enema, others so easily contract explosive diarrhea.

Love, in Shakespearean and entirely unscientific terms comes out of your heart and you cannot mess with it, the same why poop comes out your anus, and you cannot mess with that either… unless you’re an underpaid Japanese porn star.

From this loving-is-pooping perspective, I systematically scanned my environment to learn something new about my fellow Arabs: how they love!

We’re very passionate people by nature. We throw shoes at those who disagree with us and yell when we greet each other—not to mention the occasional bombing when you really hit a nerve. I hate to break stereotypes, but some aren’t like that. They’re all soft and civilian! And they defecate rather differently as well.

This is why I’ve categorized the different types of affairs that are only available in a country where no one owns an umbrella.

The Romantics

They refer to themselves as “lovers” and modestly flirt via eyelashes, missed calls, and text messages. Arabs are not too keen on public affection, or intimacy, or any physical expression of emotion between a man and a woman. This is troublesome for obvious reasons for a betrothed you couple, so the modest girl must modestly incite the modest guy in order to retain a modest virgin aura. To do so, she resorts to frequent eyelash fluttering and the very Egyptian, cat-and-mouse calling. Usually the guy calls the girl who is not supposed to answer (as not to cost him money), but merely indulge herself in the ringtone.

Unfortunately, the Egyptian movie industry revolves around this category of lovers, which results in grossly sexual movies. Despite showing little skin, they somehow manage to out sexualize French movies (which aren’t gross at all, for obvious reasons!) through this modest-sexually-suppressed demeanor. It’s like being stuck in a humid human-sized, misty glass bottle with your parents fondling each other.

The Pickled

These are people who have been soaked in the bitterness of their own tears inside the sad, rusty jar that is their life. They are single, and acutely aware of it. This category includes the fat, the flat, the spinsters, the widows, the ugly, and the barren. The celibacy takes its toll on the males first, who then channel their frustration onto the closest female relative or neighbor. They refer to themselves as “secret admirers,” with extra emphasis on the secret. Their hobbies include stalking, hair sniffing and love letter writing.

Female pickles, on the other hand, merely eat and glare at their surroundings. If love really was poop, they would kill for the weakest breeze of a fart.

The Sufferers

This is when a pickle meets a romantic, and they fall in shit.

It’s double the misery, because they’re in pairs. They’re always a young couple; old sufferers go to a retirement farm or switch to full-time pickles. They suffer from the same old sob story, it’s either lack of money, parental approval or less likely, conflict over religion. They must spend several years eye fluttering and text messaging, before finally coming to terms with reality.

As far as Egyptians movies are concerned, one of the sufferers must die or get paralyzed from the waist down by the end of the movie. Also they must feature a train in a climatic moment.

The Sinful

When the sufferers do it, baby.

To Arabs this is the equivalent of taking a gun to the relationship’s head and pulling the trigger. Theoretically speaking, intimacy should breed love and pheromones. But apparently, all it does is “taint” the affair. The girl is commonly grief-stricken to the loss of her ticket to the land of the happily married, while the guy is hit with the sudden realization that he cannot marry a girl who slept with him before marriage.

In movies, the sinful always produce an illegitimate “seed,” which is to be flushed out by an unethical doctor in a shady clinic. The girl is destined to wretchedness and shame, while the guy moves on and marries a “good” woman.

The Regretful

They were lucky enough to evade the four categories but ended in the fifth and worst.

This category includes everyone in their late 20s and above.

They are fucking married.

January 13, 2012

Open Letters: An Open Letter to William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Repayment Program by Kendra Stanton Lee

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Dear William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Repayment Program,

Thank you for your recent overhaul of the Federal Direct Loan program website.

As with the prior iteration of your site, I would forget my four-digit pin as often as I would forget to conduct a breast self-exam. Thus, I appreciate that your site now allows a password that is not government-issued.

I noticed, however, that your site now offers an array of new password hint questions. NAME OF YOUR FIRST PET is no longer a menu item, so I elected to check the box next to NAME OF FIRST PERSON EVER KISSED.

At first I could not understand the relationship between teenage pecks and student loans, but then I realized that both had a great deal to do with miscalculation.

So now, barring any password recall dysfunction, the name of “Wonderboy” will always guarantee access to my student loan repayment account.

The sentiment almost overwhelms me.

You’re such an ol’ romantic, William D. Ford. Conjuring epic tales of young love on the road to debilitating debt fulfillment. You knew our eyes would sparkle, recalling 7th grade rendezvous at the roller skating rink, as you ushered us into a portal where the awe-inspiring figures in the STILL OWED field would wax long and large.

The convenience of the FIRST KISS password trigger cannot be underestimated. I am so glad, in fact, that you have enabled me to pay homage to my first kiss through the occasion of my monthly hemorrhage that I no longer opt for auto payment. Frankly, I find myself forgetting my password on purpose just to input the name of Wonderboy in that FORGOT YOUR PASSWORD query form.

Oh, Mr. William D. Ford, how I saved myself for that smooch! There in the foyer of my mom’s house, where once upon a time I had waited for carpool pick-ups, overheating in my Columbia Bugaboo parka. One day Wonderboy knocked on the door and went all Mr. Darcy on my pride and my prejudice against fair-haired choir boys. And I? Was never the same.

So I will drop his name, I’m with Wonderboy, like a bootlegger trying to penetrate a blind pig. Only now I am stepping up to the bar to repay my gargantuan debt. And though my current tax status is married with two dependents, I will give thanks, Mr. W. D. Ford, for this opportunity to recall simpler times. Times I that I took Intro to Communication Theory and Yoga I and Painters of the Italian Renaissance and spent my entire work-study paycheck buying rounds at a bar called Chipper’s, never imagining the small alpine hill of debt at which I would need to chip away for the next 35 years, against the din of my children begging to take karate lessons.

Whenever I change addresses or bank accounts, I will log back in and identify myself as the person whose lips were first pressed by Wonderboy. To you, Mr. Ford, and to Wonderboy, I know that I was never just a number.

Mr. Dubs D. Ford, it would appear, that you don’t mind a gal who will kiss and tell. As you move your invisible hand every 30 days to remove the hefty sum from my checking account, please feel $108.76 worth of my heartfelt thanks. I am much indebted.

Kindest regards,
Kendra Stanton Lee

January 12, 2012

No Fear of Flying: Kamikaze Missions in Death, Sex, and Comedy: Wheres Tom Petty From? by Michelle Mirsky

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At a moment when the mire of my grief threatened to subsume me, I made the decision to seek delight. I set about entangling myself with a dazzling iconoclast whom I had known and admired for many years. He required no convincing. The beauty of the thing was that it fit into the cracks of my life and of his: lunches and late nights and weekend afternoon snacks. The awfulness of the thing was that it turned out we were very fond of one another. Awful mostly in that I was still married. He was also not single. And this relationship was never intended for the realm of fairytale endings. In its effort to escape the sad morass, my grief-bound heart had reached for distraction and instead found itself in the gulag of an infatuation so all-consuming, my world rang with the song of it like the white noise of the ocean in a shell. If love is a mixtape, infatuation is a broken record; a single song played at a deafening volume. When things get star-crossed enough, you start to live inside the lyrics, and sometimes, it seems not half bad. This is how it went with my iconoclast for a while. During these months Neko Case sang “I’m an Animal” and it echoed everywhere.

“I do my best, but I’m made of mistakes…I’m an animal. You’re an animal too.”

Much of my time with the iconoclast was a bubble of Peter Pan hedonism: champagne cocktails, giggling, marathon naps, bootlegged 1980s TV comedies, and ohdeargod sex. I relished the chance to hide in the surface with him and not apologize for the joy I found there. Sometimes, we’d lay awake at night and drop our diving bells into the deep sea of sadness and longing and existential terror. We were godless and fearless and certain only that there was nothing more than this. We fought intensely about his intractability, my selfishness. He lectured. I pouted. Neko Case again:

“This Tornado Loves You. This Tornado loves you. What will make you believe me?”

When I found myself crying in bed with him a week after Lev’s funeral, I knew my first attempt to break it off with the iconoclast (after he had forgotten my birthday) had not, in fact, been successful. I began to search earnestly for something to distract me from my distraction. My casual dalliance with the iconoclast had become real and challenging and I found myself wanting something less; someone new, something other, but nothing more. The Blond Poet was (until he wasn’t) a welcome diversion fueled, in part, by my drive to erase my desire for the iconoclast (whose siren song I was able to ignore in favor of the poet’s for a brief while). Post-poet, I resisted the easy comfort of going back to Neverland. Instead, I took Joss home to my parents’ house in Albany and walked the blizzard-paralyzed city. I walked my parents’ neighborhood at night and watched the snow shine in the halos of streetlights, listened for the familiar squeaks and pops as my feet pressed the fresh-fallen powder into the texture of Styrofoam on the sidewalks under my boots.

On a late December afternoon, with the tinsel-bloat of Christmas still clinging to everything, I hovered outside a store in the mall while my mother and son shopped, busying myself with my phone as contemporary folks do. After weeks of nothing, my iconoclast had texted to tell me he wanted to take my photo. He’d discovered one last roll of Kodachrome—the iconic slide film, now discontinued—he’d need to shoot in the next 24 hours and send for processing before the last remaining lab in the country quit developing it at the turn of the new year. My heart swelled then broke a little. I was nowhere near, nor would I be for days. That we’d be star-crossed yet again was no bolt from the blue. It was just as well, really. No happy ending.

“You’ll be a hard act to follow, A bitter pill to swallow, You’ll be tough, you’ll be tough to replace.” — Rolling Stones “Plundered My Soul”

After the poet, there was a flirtation with a recent Brown graduate with Vampire Weekend sunglasses and a Harvard scarf. He’d battled cancer and was about to enter medical school. He picked me a flower on his way to our first date. He wanted me to be impressed by these things. But I was not — my ex-husband graduated from Brown; my son died of cancer; I work in a hospital simply lousy with doctors. What else have you got, sir? He told me I made him nervous. And he gave up. Next, there was the PhD candidate from out of town with whom I thought I was developing a friendship founded in vocabulary and misfit snobbery. I thought him quite lovely on our afternoon at the museum, but he turned out, in truth, to be a gloomy misogynist who seemed to feel the principles of eminent domain were valid reasons why his tongue kept ending up in my mouth. After that debacle, I caved, went back to the well. I felt not the slightest bit distracted, but I kept on trying. In the spring, there was the lawyer, who on the strength of his looks and kisses lasted the longest, but was not in fact, well suited to me at all. My description of him prompted the iconoclast to ask: “Will you fall in love with him and stop coming to see me?” Obviously not.

“The storms are raging on the rolling sea, and on the highway of regret. The winds of change are blowing wild and free. You ain’t seen nothing like me yet. I could make you happy, make your dreams come true. Nothing that I wouldn’t do. Go to the ends of the earth for you, to make you feel my love…” — Adele (singing Bob Dylan’s words) “Make You Feel My Love”

In my experience, stemming the tide of one’s own brooding infatuation consists mainly of not continuing to sleep with the person who reduces you to a quivering mess. At this, I was a failure many times over. All manner of poet-shaped and other distractions served as evidence that perhaps my destiny, for a while at least, lay in this relationship that had begun as a distraction from the day-to-day slog of my crumbled and crumbling life and had come to be a security blanket I wasn’t yet ready to give up. Perhaps it was not love or lust that would save me from my sadness. Perhaps I needed another outlet. I contemplated taking a group sewing class, but thought something more physical was probably in order. I looked into ballet. Once, I ran with my dog. But I got winded and felt like an asshole and promptly gave up. The nightlife was more my comfort zone, but what in the hell could I do there other than meet new boys to break my heart worse?

On one of his visits to town, I brought the PhD candidate to a comedy festival. I was friends with the guy who ran the thing so we had great seats and got to schmooze a bit and feel important. I had attended the same festival the year before and fallen head over heels in hero-worship with one of the comics. He was on the bill again this night and I was positively bursting at the seams to watch his new material. His set brought me to tears. Not tears of laughter, actual overflowing soul-deep tears. His work was insightful and reasoned and philosophical while simultaneously being biting and hilarious and moving. I laughed too, of course, as hard as a person can laugh and still take in enough oxygen to stay conscious. Listening to this comedian kill made me as happy as I had been since Lev died. This. This was bliss.

I had been contemplating for a while the concept of trying stand-up comedy. Making light of the worst life had to offer was my one and only effective coping mechanism and my tendency toward dazzle camouflage made me unafraid of putting on a show. At one point, in passing, I had bounced the idea off the iconoclast. Should I try stand-up? He reacted immediately. His eyes got wide and he told me I shouldn’t. Changed the subject. I was so stunned, I didn’t ask why. Regardless of the reason, I had held it in the back of my mind, felt maybe I needed to prove to myself that I was cut from the cloth of my idols. But could I do it? Could I own the room? Could I even get my shit together enough to do three minutes at an open mic? It would be a new kind of writing for me. It would take pathos and sincerity and boundless cynicism. And patience. I would be able to focus on very little else. And I would keep it from the iconoclast. I would do it for the first time in St. Louis where I was headed for work in the spring. I had two months to plan and write. Fucking perfect. Done and done.

I had all of these thoughts and made the decision to venture into comedy in a fog of punch lines and endorphins during some wisp of a second between comedians. The PhD candidate and I went for a drink after the show and geeked out about the amazingness of what we’d just seen. At the end of the night he surprised me by trying to make out with me in a parking garage and we didn’t see each other again. I didn’t tell him about my plan to tell jokes onstage. I didn’t tell anyone for a while. I was all jacked up with frustrated energy, which I poured into joke writing. And I was more than tenacious enough to get up on stage when I had the jokes to fill the time. I didn’t care if I was awful (though somehow I knew I wouldn’t be). I would be better eventually. And someday, I would kill.

January 11, 2012

Funny jokes-Useful tips for becoming a Superhero

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Thinking of becoming a superhero? Here are some useful pointers.

1. Don’t call yourself by your real name, e.g. Ms. Jenny Pinchuck, The Amazing Stevie Foster.

2. Don’t call yourself by someone else’s real name, e.g. Mr. Teddy Kennedy, Captain Dean Martin.

3. Choose a name that suggests power, heroism and prowess, e.g. Captain Power, Thunderman, Mr. Invincible, Justiceman.

4. Don’t be too modest, e.g. Mr. Pretty Good, Captain So-So, Fairly Incredibleman.

5. But don’t labor the point, e.g. Mr. So-Powerful-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It-Buddy.

6. Don’t choose a name detrimental to your crime fighting image, e.g. Captain Spongecake, Mr. Silly, Yellow Streak, Purple Slippers, Captain Evil.

7. Don’t choose the name of an existing Superhero unless you have lots of money and enjoy fighting litigation instead of supervillains.

8. It’s no use calling yourself Captain Invincible if your only power is self-control over Hostess Twinkies and you suffer from a congenial hole-in-the-heart condition. It’s just asking for trouble.

9. Don’t call yourself the Invisible Boy if you’re not.

10. Don’t call yourself the Invisible Boy if you’re a girl.

11. Don’t call yourself the Invisible Lady if you’re a man — even if you do feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body.

12. Don’t give away important information in your name, e.g. The Glass Jaw, Captain Vulnerable-to-Strontium 90.

13. Don’t call yourself The Green Avenger if you wear an orange costume. You’ll confuse people.

January 10, 2012

Dendrophila and Other Social Taboos: Eminem Sex Dreams Decoded by Dani Burlison

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In the thick of the 8 Mile era, he appears out of nowhere, rescuing me from a pretentious hipster bar. Lanky twenty-somethings sipping two dollar PBRs in their nicotine-soaked white belt adorned skinny jeans avoid eye contact while slouching over bar stools. The room is a thick dark cloud of off-putting pheromones and swollen egos. I grow increasingly restless. A friend excuses herself, stumbling outside with a shaggy-haired bass player and he approaches, politely asking to sit down.

“My name is…” he mumbles, while the indie rock band whines from the stage.

“I know your name,” I say, welcoming the attention. “Sit down.”

We discuss politics, genetic engineering and needle exchange programs. He invites me to a private screening of a factory farming documentary back at his San Francisco hotel room. Tugging at his baggy trousers, he leads me out of the bar.

Back at the hotel, his passionate rant about dismantling the racist prison industrial complex lures me, without hesitation, into the hotel bed, which is stacked with handmade quilts. “I made those myself,” he says.

Eminem is a closet quilter. I am so putting out.

He’s just aggressive enough to keep me pleased without hurting me in ways that I don’t want to be hurt. His hands are smooth and strong, save for the calluses where the mic is usually firmly grasped. But on this night, my night of an unbridled sexcapade, tangled up in Eminem’s hand-sewn rag quilts, the only thing in his hand is my body. Every single naughty bit of it.

As the sun rises, he serves the best organic orange juice ever and asks if I can stay another night. “I have season four of Sex and the City,” he says, brushing the hair from my eyes. “I love it when Samantha explores her sexuality with that amazing Brazilian artist, Maria. Love should see no boundaries. Let’s hold each other and watch it.”

He rubs my feet with Ayurvedic sesame oil, leading his hands to all sorts of glorious places on my ravaged body. He makes sweet tender love to me—with the expected intermittent Eminem-style stamina and welcomed throw down—over and over and over again. And again.

I leave the following morning to meet a friend for breakfast. As I dash nutmeg atop my steamed chai, I notice that he, Eminem, is standing in the corner of the cafe, smiling. “I miss you already,” he mouths from across the room.

I approach him. He hands over poetry and sketches of boats and hearts he’s scrawled across his napkins. “These are for you. I’ll never forget you.” He looks down, pulls up his drawers and walks away.

I know, Eminem. It feels so empty without me.

He shows up again, repeatedly, over the next ten years. He’s always a gentleman, always an animal—sometimes a kitten, sometimes a tiger—in the sack. We meet at airports, on road trips, at campgrounds, in waiting rooms at the veterinarian office. And once in the parking lot at Whole Foods where he carried so many bottles of so much fresh juice. Ten years of the best sex of my life. With Eminem. While I am asleep. Why not Leonard Cohen or Margaret Cho or Mark Wahlberg’s character in I Heart Huckabees? Eminem is so upset. And isn’t it wrong for a feminist to really, really enjoy sex dreams with some dude who, well, hates everyone, everywhere except his kids and Dr. Dre?

What does it all mean?

After shying away from asking my Certified Dream Analyst for insight, I did some research on my own. Here’s what some of the experts say:

Freud: If the dream had a ton of penis action already, then maybe Eminem has a pipe in his pants and I need that game piece to play Clue. But that’s a different type of pipe. Maybe I should still look in his pants. Also, the rooms where we always have sex symbolize wombs. I should probably ask my mom but maybe Eminem is my brother. If he is, Freud would still want me to have sex with him, I think.

Jung: It’s quite obvious that Slim Shady personifies the shadow archetype. Maybe that’s why I keep having sex with him in dark, shadowy places. Is he my animus? Do I want to have more sex with myself? Maybe Eminem’s shadow side is vegan and shops at Whole Foods. Maybe I just need a glass of fresh juice.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: I have a lot in common with Eminem. And if good friends are hard to find, maybe Eminem and I should enjoy life on a prairie somewhere. All of our kids would love it.

Radical activist view: Internalized sexism. I hate myself and my girly bits. Maybe I don’t care as much about the world as everyone thinks. Maybe deep down I hate women as much as he seems to. Shit. I need to take back the night and challenge oppression. In bed with Eminem. And then cancel my subscription to Ms.

My therapist: What do I think it means?

Power animal: Maybe Eminem is my power animal. I’m not sure what Eminem’s native elders think his power animal is, but since he was born in the Year of the Rat, I say it’s a rat. The rat is the first animal in Chinese astrology. Maybe Eminem is like an angry Adam and I am his sex-crazed Eve and together we can rule the world. Kind of like Wonder Twins. Or maybe it isn’t a rat but a rabbit. Rabbits indicate lots of sex, which leads me back to Freud, and me needing to have sex with Eminem, who might be my brother.

Runes (translated to Norwegian): I thought about my dreams and threw some stones. They read: Marshall elsker du og han ønsker å holde deg varm med hans rage. It’s cold in Norway.

Christian view: He needs to be saved. Maybe my life purpose is to smolder Marshall’s seething anger with a big, fierce, naked hug. Maybe I need to find God and if I do, maybe he’ll lead me to a San Francisco hotel room where I can drink juice. I’m really thirsty.

Annie Lennox: Sweet dreams are indeed, made of these. Maybe Eminem and I want to use and abuse each other. I think we can heal each other. It might be really good for us. Really.

Male friends: You need to stop dating crazy angry guys. You’re gonna end up in a trunk.

Female friends: You date wimps. You need to hit that shit. I bet he’s actually a really nice guy.

Yoda: If the dark side clouds everything then maybe Eminem’s dark public persona just casts a shadow over his sensitive, spiritual side. Maybe I should take him to yoga. And then go out for juice. And watch Star Wars.

Joseph Campbell: If dreamtime leads us to permanent fixtures in our psyches then maybe Eminem is a part of me, like a twin, and contrary to Freud’s wishes, we shouldn’t have sex because that would be incest or something and I’m pretty sure incest is illegal, especially for twins. Also, Campbell says dreams support our conscious lives so maybe Eminem is my sugar daddy and I should just ask him to support me and buy me the house he offered up in my 6th dream about him.

Oprah: If living my best life means that it doesn’t get better than sex dreams about Eminem than maybe I should leave it at that and not have sex with him. Maybe I’d end up on fire. Or in his trunk. With no juice. I wouldn’t like that.

Confucius: “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” Maybe Eminem lost something in that first dream and he keeps coming back for sex because he’s trying to find it in my pants. Maybe I need an X-ray so I can find it for him and send it in the mail so the dreams stop.

Wizardry and other assorted magic. Namely, the wisdom of Albus Dumbledore: If it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, then I think that maybe Dumbledore thinks the only way to make sense of the dreams is to live this all out, either through sex with Eminem or with a stand-in or body double or what have you. Dumbledore also says that happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light. Slim Shady needs to come to the light, I think. And I think the light is in my pants and in his pants, too. But what does Dumbledore know? He got smoked by Snape. Maybe he don’t know shit.

Eminem: I think he’s reaching out to me, telepathically, and that maybe he’d see this as an opportunity to seize everything he ever wanted and have sex with me. And that I am his portal to show the world that he’s socially conscious and is a really gifted quilter and he needs me to help him set up some quilting classes through an adult education program. Or maybe I’m just more thirsty than I realize and I do, in fact, need some juice.

January 9, 2012

In These Deserts: War Stories From Afghanistan: Column 21: Epilogue by Nathan Bradley

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The best way to describe my opinion of the plot of the movie The Hurt Locker is as follows: imagine watching The Silence of the Lambs, except at inopportune dramatic moments the characters spring into a Bollywood song-and-dance number. Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter are inexplicably warbling in Hindi in his jail cell flanked by prancing elephants and choreographed dancers in lab coats. Then, it’s suddenly serious again, as if nothing had happened.

That said, when explaining the feeling of returning to the real world, there’s a part of the film that actually gets it completely right. Near the end, when Sergeant James can’t save the guy with the bomb locked to his body, the aftermath of the explosion and chaos suddenly cuts to a scene of James cleaning the gutters at his house, James wearing civilian clothes, James confused by the absurd plenty of a local supermarket. That is what it feels like.

My friends let me stay with them in a hotel in Anchorage on my first night home, and jet lag kept me awake and alert while two beers kept me almost dangerously intoxicated. I felt great—I felt nothing but hope and excitement. Within twenty-four hours, I had my truck out of storage and was scouting for a place to live. Within three days I had rented a house, and the absolute terror that I felt when I realized that I was sleeping unarmed gave me an indication that things might not be so easy.

In truth, the startled moments and the unease went away pretty quickly. The boredom, however, set in almost immediately upon returning to work, and though the month’s vacation that I spent in Washington, D.C. was a welcome reprieve, the frustrations of transitioning back to garrison life (and an office job) seemed overwhelming. I made up my mind that I was going to get out of the Army—the excitement was gone, the war seemed to be following an endless cycle, and my disappointment at the news was matched only by my desire to go back there, back to a place where I felt relevant.

I studied journalism in college, and it seemed an ideal profession to pursue. I fully intended to move to Kabul and start work as a freelancer. I contacted some old colleagues who worked in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. They had some great advice: first, don’t try to contact the Taliban yourself. Second, make sure you have a lot of money saved up. Third, don’t expect work in the wintertime—the war practically shuts down in Kabul. Expatriates and government wonks can be snotty, they said, and don’t expect a good nightlife.

Still, it sounded better than getting up at 5 a.m. every morning to stand in the inevitably freezing Alaskan air, to prepare legion PowerPoint slides for training meetings, training synch meetings, command and staff meetings, brigade air operations meetings and the like. In the span of two weeks of traveling back from the war zone that had become my home, I had gone from T.E. Lawrence to Milton Waddams.

During a speech at West Point, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a comment that stuck with me: “Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day reformatting PowerPoint slides. The consequences of this terrify me.’’

That was me, and there was nothing to be done. Nobody liked their jobs: that was the dirty secret of what coming home actually meant. The consequences that I experienced were: contempt, bitterness, despair and a desire to drink to excess on a regular basis. My work was unpleasantly simple and mundane. I’d spend my idle time in the office researching apartments for sale in Buenos Aires, townhouses for sale in Washington D.C. or organic farming cooperatives in (no joke) Nagorno-Karabakh. I’d spend my weekends hammered reading the depressing Afghanistan updates posted on the New York Times by C.J. Chivers or Dexter Filkins. I hated every minute of it, and I was ready to leave it all behind to go somewhere and do something real.

That is, until the morning that I checked my email and discovered that the Army’s Human Resources Command had corrected a clerical error it made in 2007: the terms of my enlistment had been updated, and the earliest date on which I could exit the military had shifted from June 2011 to May 2014. It was all my own fault, but the information I had received every time I queried had clearly stated 2011. So, heart-set on finding a new occupation, I instead found myself staring at the next four years and the implications therein. It didn’t help much that a girl had broken my heart a few weeks before. Everything seemed to be in free-fall. I would have deployed back to Afghanistan in a heartbeat if they had just let me.

And then, unbelievably, the opportunity to write this column arose. Then, two days after I received word that I had the chance to publish my story, a unique opportunity to deploy to Central America and work in humanitarian assistance for six months arose, too. Of course I accepted. Looking back on this past year, it’s easy to imagine that none of it had ever been in doubt, that it was always going to transpire this way, but honestly it’s terrifying to think about what might have happened if it hadn’t. No one who survived the war is a stranger to blind fate, to the abritrary nature that decides who lives or dies, and so there’s no reason to dwell on it. That was just how it was.

Sharing my story has been an absolute privilege, even if the story wasn’t always positive. I’ve been particularly thankful to receive messages from other soldiers, especially the ones who deployed with me and who recognized themselves in my writing. They are the most terrifying jury of my peers that I could possibly imagine, and I hope I’ve done right by what took place.

Finally, an update on what’s happened since I left:

My interpreters Tony and Santos (the interpreter who helped me with Abdulhaq) are still in Afghanistan and working for the coalition. I hope that they get their visas in Fiscal Year 2012, but I have no influence. We still keep in touch via Facebook, and though I can’t do much from here, I’m thankful that they’re safe.

I wrote Brian’s parents a letter after he died, and I have since become friends with them. They and their family adopted my detachment and sent us dozens of care packages throughout our deployment. They are the most generous and kind people I have ever met.

My soldier Tony, with whom I went on leave, got out of the Army and is now in training to be a locomotive engineer. He had a rough year, too, but things are getting better, he says. He lives in Atlanta, and I’m going to go see him one of these days.

Khan is still there and still working for the governor’s office. He had the governor’s spokesman write out an email that he dictated; he says his kids still ask him when they can come over to his friends’ house to play again. I’m still holding out hope that I will get to talk to him again. I tried calling him on Skype once, but the connection is terrible and my Pashto is not much better.

Governor Katawazai is now the deputy chief of the Afghan National Directorate of Security. I’m sure he’s doing alright. He is a canny survivor above all things.

My battalion commander has become a huge supporter of my writing, and is a voice of reason when I feel like I’m going insane. We were all more than lucky to have so conscientious a person in charge of us over there. He’s still in the Army for now.

Most of my soldiers from the compound have left the military. I don’t blame them; they saw the ill-lubricated gears of the war grinding on an hourly basis. I still talk to most of them, and I envision us all as aging, cranky vets at some distant reunion. Some of them are back in Afghanistan already. All of the ones who stayed in our battalion will be back by the end of this year. I worry about all of them.

I never saw Abdulhaq again. All of my experience gives me the impression that he probably held on to that letter. Maybe I’ll see it again someday. Maybe I’ll even see him. I’m enrolled in a program that will have me studying intensive Pashto soon, and with luck I’ll actually learn that language well enough to truly communicate what I want to say. I know I’d recognize him if we ever crossed paths.

A few days after I published the column about Shams ul-Haq and Syed ur-Rahman, I received word from Tony that their father had been captured and beheaded by the local insurgency. Not even religious leaders are safe in that conflict, and it was a sad reminder of just how fragile things really are over there.

I contacted both Tony and Santos and asked them if they could get in contact with the family. I know that they must have cousins and uncles who will provide for them—kinship is important above all else there—but they just lost their father, the head of the household and the only one employed. The boys are just two of eight kids. I wanted to see if I might be able to send some money: a thousand dollars to try and keep them on their feet for the time being.

It’s extraordinarily hard to wire money to Afghanistan, and so rather than sending it directly to the boys (whose personal information I didn’t really know), I asked Santos if I could wire it to him instead and have him deliver it in cash. Getting the particulars of his bank account took about a week’s worth of back-and-forth messages on Facebook. In the meantime, I had to attend the 2011 U.S. Army Maneuver Conference in Columbus, Georgia, where I encountered my old company commander—not the awful one, but rather the one for whom I served as a platoon leader before deployment.

Waiting in the hallway before whatever afternoon speech fell next on the schedule, I asked him what he thought of my plan. I told him that I figured it was my obligation: I make in a week what an Afghan family makes in a year, and if the interpreters give them the money, I know it’s not going to the insurgency. He unequivocally disapproved, and was angry that I would even suggest it. In his opinion, it was just a means of making myself feel righteous, and in truth they were going to either make it or starve to death, and the sooner they figured out which, the better. I asked him what kind of employment he expected a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old to find. “I know plenty of ANA commanders who would love to have them as chai boys,” he said, making reference to the almost ubiquitous practice of child sex abuse and victimization that takes place among Afghans. Almost everyone I know who’s deployed there has some story of encountering it.

All around us in the re-purposed ironworks of a convention center were defense contractor booths hawking new technologies: new optics for snipers, new drone aircraft, new camouflage, new armed combat vehicles, new assault rifles, new mortar tubes, new munitions, new armaments. The networking and glad-handing taking place between the lines in this conference would clearly lead to new acquisitons, to billions of dollars changing hands between the Department of Defense and the familiar names like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, the companies whose skyscrapers loom over Arlington, Virginia and line the capitol like medieval siege towers. When the irony of the scene struck me, the solution became obvious. I sent the money.

January 6, 2012

American Policy Suggestions from a Chicago Sports Fan: The Bears Fired Jerry Angelo, But Is It Enough to Save the Economy? by Matt McKenna

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Most Americans are familiar with the two economic bubbles that severely disrupted the U.S. economy during the aughts: the dot-com bubble that burst in 2001 and the real estate bubble that began to deflate in 2006. Blame for these speculative manias have been hurled—fairly and unfairly—at myriad individuals and organizations. Many pundits blame politicians for lack of oversight. Fault has also been directed towards the financial institutions that gambled away the national economy for short-term profit. Still others blame regular, “main street” Americans who personally over-leveraged themselves. With so many accusations of stupidity and impropriety bandied about, it is a wonder that nary a word has been written or uttered regarding the most damaging catalyst of modern economic bubbles. This, of course, is a problem since all the well-meaning regulation our government can muster will be for naught if it doesn’t first address the market distorting effects of former Chicago Bears general manager Jerry Angelo.

To understand the economic bubbles of the previous decade, one must first understand another type of bubble introduced by the recently dismissed Angelo administration. These bubbles were and are created not by inflated stock prices or outrageous valuations, but by building a sub-par Bears team that nonetheless goes on to have an inexplicably fantastic season. Examples of “win bubbles” include a Chicago team that had no business going 13-3 and winning the division in 2001 and another that played in the 2006 Super Bowl despite starting Rex Grossman at quarterback. Like all bubbles, these win bubbles eventually burst, and chagrined Bears fans are left to ponder why they bothered to put on clothes and walk to the bar just to see their hapless team get crushed by three touchdowns to one of the lesser franchises in one of the lesser divisions in a game in which the opposing team was missing crucial members of their offensive line and were clearly outmatched on both sides of the ball. The pain, however, is not limited solely to Bears fans. Indeed, once optimism in the Bears’ future playoff opportunities falters, it is empirically demonstrable that economic bubbles will soon start to pop and the stock market will tank. This is the pain felt by the wider economy.

Jerry Angelo became the General Manager for Chicago Bears in 2001, inheriting a 5-11 club and a stock market that had already dropped 27% between January 1st and September 23rd when the Bears notched their first win of the season. The Bears then rattled off five more consecutive victories and went on to surprise sports and economic analysts by accumulating a 13-3 record. Fan expectations for the next season rose, and the economy appeared to stabilize. By the time the regular season ended with the Bears as an unlikely division champion, the S&P was up 21% from its 2001 low point.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. After a brutal home playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles and a disheartening 4-12 follow-up season, expectations once again plummeted. This correction propelled the dot-com bust to new lows and lead to a -22.10% annual return for the S&P 500 in 2002.

As dramatic as the collapse of the 2001 win bubble was, it pales in comparison to the 2006 version. The Bears finished the previous season with a respectable 11-5 record and a trip to the playoffs. Fans, still skeptical from the previous bubble, were cautiously optimistic about the next season’s possibilities. To the (temporary) joy of Bears followers and economists alike, the 2006 season was even more spectacular than could reasonably be hoped as the team finished the regular season 13-3 and made it all the way to the Super Bowl. The stock market responded and the S&P 500’s annual return shot up to 15.79%.

Although pundits and fans were initially bullish on the Bears chances for the following 2007 season, a sense of unease slithered its way throughout Chicagoland after the ugly loss to the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLI. Those fears, sadly, were warranted. As the Bears tragically finished the 2007 season with a losing record, the S&P annual return dropped more than 10% from the previous year as the concomitant housing bubble began to burst. Unfortunately, a single year was not enough time to absorb all the disappointment endured by such a pathetic follow up effort to a promising Super Bowl season. Thus, by 2008, the win bubble that catalyzed the housing bubble that catalyzed the worldwide financial crisis was in full effect. The S&P’s annual return for 2008 was a ghastly -37.00%, and the world economy has yet to fully recover.

Heading into 2012, economists and Chicago sports columnists should be gravely concerned because all indicators show that Angelo has once again produced a win bubble. The Bears 2010 season ended in surprise appearance in the NFC Championship game—a game few analysts felt the Bears had a chance to win because there existed no good explanation for how the Bears got there in the first place. Not surprisingly, the Bears 2011 season was a disappointment, ending with a 8-8 record despite a relatively easy schedule. Sound familiar? It should: this sort of out-of-nowhere-wonderful season followed up by a heinously terrible season is the unmistakable indicator of a win bubble. Now that we’ve seen a win bubble, will we also see the bursting of another economic bubble in 2012? I certainly wouldn’t bet against it.

What can be done to stabilize the Chicago Bears success and subsequently the economy? Well, firing Angelo was a start: his tenure as general manager has been fraught with bubbles of all stripes, and the team/economy clearly needs a new direction lest the suffering continue. It is now up to all of us to hold the Bears organization responsible for putting a team together that is geared towards long-term success and economic growth rather than short-term playoff appearances with booms and shameful, shameful busts.

January 5, 2012

Really funny jokes-Heart transplant

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The doctor comes to see his heart transplant patient. “This is good news. It is very unusual, but we have two donors to choose from for your new heart.”

The patient is pleased. He asks, “What were their jobs?”

“One was a teacher and the other was an accountant.” “I’ll take the accountant’s heart,” says the patient. “I want one that hasn’t been used.”

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