Entries from February 2003 ↓

I’m watching Dan Rather’s interview with Saddam Hussein. It’s fascinating. Hussein comes off as a fairly reasonable guy, an aging Arab aristocrat, well-spoken and slightly rumpled. He does let slip the occasional unsettling phrase (”jealousy is for women”), but nothing especially Hitlerish. If you’d just ripvanwinkled your way out of a century-long nap, and this is the first thing you’d heard about the Iraq situation, you’d probably be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Of course, he spent much of the interview spouting lies so outrageous, and with such placid equanimity, that I have to assume he believed everything he was saying. In Saddam’s head, Iraq didn’t lose the gulf war; the Iraqi people are happy under his despotic reign; there’s nothing suspect about his near 100% plurality in the last “election”; and so on, for hours, with out ever missing a beat. At one point he stopped his translator in mid-sentence, telling him to refer to our Prez not as “Bush”, but as “Mister Bush”, because he and the Iraqi people show respect even for their enemies. As Rather pointed out, he also tried to get Bush senior assassinated, and his state-run newspapers refer to Bush junior as the “snake”.

Whatever. I don’t think anyone really took this interview seriously. It was very entertaining, however, to see the monster we’ve heard so much about sitting calm and hornless at a little table, in front of microphone, speaking softly and smiling patiently at every provocation Rather hurled his way.

What’s really interesting, though, is to speculate on what the American government did when they found out that CBS had scored this interview. Did they approach Dan Rather and delicately suggest that he should view this as more than a simple scoop? That it’s really a golden opportunity to help his nation in its time of need? That they would be happy to replace his normal pen with one capable of firing .22 caliber bullets, or exploding, or releasing poisonous gas, or doing any number of nasty things to the corpus of a dictator who just happened to be sitting right across the table from its holder? That he, Dan Rather, elder statesman of American journalism and respected newsman, could end his years of public service by saving the lives of hundreds of American servicemen and thousands of Iraqis, by cutting the head off the problem that’s vexed the world for over a decade?

Of course they didn’t. I’m sure it was tempting, though, on some level. There’s been much speculation that, if the shadier aspects of the American military and intelligence communities could find a way to assassinate Hussein, they would.

I’m equally sure that, if asked, Rather would have refused, and he would have had lots of good reasons to do so. Even if he could kill Saddam, wouldn’t someone as bad or worse just step in to fill his shoes? Wouldn’t that enrage the Arab “street” that we’ve been hearing so much about lately, and engender a wave of terrorist attacks across Europe and the US? Wouldn’t that alienate half of our European allies, and place the governments of all our authoritarian, non-democratic Arab allies (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia), already working hard to quash public sentiment and crush any signs of fundamentalist rebellion, in a great deal of jeopardy?

And so on. But then again: if Rather could end the possibility of war by just killing one man, then he really would be saving the lives of thousands of people. Isn’t that worth his life, and Saddam’s, and the possibility of small-scale terrorist attacks in the future?

There’s no answer to that question, because we’re not just dealing with one man, or one government, or even one country. Everything that we do in Iraq has ramifications for the entire region, and possibly the world. It just isn’t possible to know — much less understand — all of the variables in this equation. Which is what makes the Bush Administration’s attempt to play God here, spinning rosy scenarios that have a Saddam-less, democratic Iraq under the benevolent rule of the American empire setting an example for the entire Arab world, so frightening.

I saw a goose standing alone on a broad field of snow yesterday, while I was out on my afternoon walk. It was just hanging out, at the end of a long trail of gooseprints, staring straight ahead, not doing much. I stopped and watched it for a while. You don’t often see geese alone. They’re pack animals, I think. Or flock animals. Whatever.

I don’t like geese very much. No, that’s understating it. I despise them. I think they’re loathsome creatures, avian weeds, a terrible evolutionary error that someone needs to fix. I’m not sure why I feel this way — maybe it’s because they crap so copiously and with such little regard for the cleanliness of the soles of human pedestrians. Maybe it’s because they’re belligerant creatures who bully ducks aside whenever scraps of bread are flung their way. Maybe it’s because of all that unbearable honking.

But I didn’t feel that familiar wash of revulsion when I saw yesterday’s goose. It looked small and insignfinicant and almost invisible, standing in the middle of all that white: and, paradoxically, that made it seem almost noble, to me, and brave, and a little sad.

It was a melancholy and exhilirating sight, when it should have just been commonplace. I watched it for a while, standing in the street, feeling small and insignificant myself in the middle of all that black and tarmac. Then I went on my way.

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about the nature of manhood. Which is to say, my friend was telling me that I was a pansy, and I was reluctantly agreeing. The issue was whether or not I had enough balls to brave our dangerous, icy, post-snowstorm roads and come into work. I was not. He was. Hence: pansy.

This got me to thinking about the issue of what it means to be a man: “man” in the Teddy Roosevelt sense, an individual with a certain set of characteristics — bravery, steadfastness, insensitivity, bluster, bullheaded clarity of purpose — that separates him from all the Unmen. Unmen are like the Undead — creatures who have a passing resemblance to men, but are, deep down, something entirely different. Something terrible. Pansies.

It quickly became clear to me that it would be much easier to attain that quality of manhood if I knew a little bit more about what it meant to be a man, and what actions I would need to take in order to get there. To anticipate the Manhood Moments in my life, and come to them prepared.

And that’s what drove me to start Epidapheles Men and Manhood Incorporated. We at EMMI have set up the Epidapheles Men and Manhood Manhood Scale, a point system that will allow all men to determine where they stand vis-a-vis the question of their masculinity. Here are the categories, and their associated point thresholds:

Allow me to immediately stipulate that the “woman” category does not in any way refer to real females. It is merely shorthand for a man who has debased himself to such a degree that he is irredeemable, and should seek membership in some other, less demanding sex. Actual womanhood is a completely separate issue, one on which I am not qualified to comment.

Ok. A scale is all well and good. But how do you determine where you fit on that scale? Sure, most of us know instinctively if we’re Pansies, or Men, or Boys, but do we know the extent of our Pansiness? How close are we to Womanhood, really? How much do we have to improve before we can confidently call ourselves Pussies?

Thankfully, Epidapheles Men and Manhood Industries has the answer. For a very reasonable price, our Manhood Evaluation Team will come to your home and, after a thorough examination, tell you exactly where you fall on the Manhood Scale. And, should you find yourself to be somewhat lacking, our Manhood Consultants will, for an additional fee, devise a Manhood Improvement Plan tailored to your unique flaws. In just a few short weeks, we will help all you Pansies become Pussies, all you Pussies become Wusses, all you Wusses become Males. But don’t stop there! You too can be Boys, Men, Studs, and — yes — even Teddy Roosevelts. Dare to dream, you pantywaste losers. It is possible.

But wait. There’s more. We will also provide you with a Manhood Meter, a device that fits discreetly down your pants and constantly monitors your environment and your actions, counting, tallying, and evaluating your every move. At the end of the day, it’ll provide you with a complete report of your activities, and how they rate with respect to the EMM Scale.

Here’s a sample report: Informed Wife That You'll Be Home When Good and Ready: +200 Greeted Large Stranger with Limp And Pathetic Handshake: -400 Ordered Quiche at Lunch: -500 Made Sexist Comments in Front of Female Coworkers: +600 Later Apologized: -700 Ordered Thermonuclear Battery Acid Hot Hot Hot Chili at Dinner: +300 Whimpered Like a Girl After First Bite and Fled to Bathroom: -1000 Previous Manhood Score: 200 Current Manhood Score: -1300 You Are A: Pussy

Being unmale is a disease, and it can be treated. Are you man enough to call Epidapheles Men and Manhood Incorporated and request an initial consultation? There’s only one way to find out.

I deleted one of my recent blog entries today. Just now, actually. It was easy. I brought it up, reread it, cringed, hit delete. It was a pathetic, poorly written cry for help from an overprivileged whiner, in the tradition of the novels that William Dean Howells used to write about the unhappiness of the very fortunate: tragedies of the broken teacup, as some wag put it.

But that’s not important. What’s important is how easy it was. With a single click of my mouse, requiring far less energy than it takes to coax my heart into a single beat, I wiped away an embarrassing part of my past. Just like that. It was marvelous. Now I know the sharp thrill that must have traveled down the spines of the Stalinist bureaucrats who removed all of those murdered unworthies from old pictures; now I know the secret joy of the rightist punditry who keep telling us that the Reagan years were a glorious time and a ringing vindication of the theory of supply-side economics. Now I know power.

The next step is to figure out how to do it in real life. I’ll start with my entire high school career, and most of college. I’ll leave the bit where I met my wife, of course, and some of the good times with my various roommates, and the better English classes, but the rest — all the compsci courses, all the lonely nights studying for calculus exams that I was doomed to fail anyway, all the wasted hours playing Sega Hockey — go. And I’ll definitely can that early, humiliating interview with Microsoft for a summer job. I certainly don’t need that clanking around in my head.

The possibilities are endless. All I’ve got to do is find the delete button.

The Urinal Chronicles: Part 1

Steve had an odd habit of grabbing the metal stem that rose out of the top of the urinal when he was taking a leak — as if he needed to brace himself against the jet force of his piss, lest it hurl him across the men’s room. By some freak and recurring coincidence, Steve and I wound up in the bathroom at the same time at least once a day, standing together at the urinals. We’d struck up a sort of friendship, if you can call a relationship founded on two, maybe three minutes of converation with a person on the other side of a plastic divider friendship. Still, it added up. We’d been working at the same company for a year, now. That’s over three hundred minutes of quality talk.

“You know what I like best about pissing?” said Steve one day, as we stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at the same blank wall, the same featureless, slightly reflective brown tile.

“No, Steve,” I said. “What do you like best about pissing?”

“Watching other people piss.”

“Uh-huh.” I twisted my body about three degrees to the left. There was a divider between us, of course, but suddenly it didn’t seem like quite enough protection.

“Not you, asshole. You’re boring.”

“Oh. Good.” I was a little relieved to hear this, and a little sad too. “How would I go about not being boring when I’m taking a leak?”

“Well, you could hunch over the urinal, like Jackson does.” At this, Steve rounded his back and pressed himself forward, looking over his shoulder with wide, frightened eyes, in a perfect imitation of Frank Jackson. Frank peed like Brad Pitt would if he were in jail, always on the lookout for amorous advances from fellow inmates.

I chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Or you could do a Paul Robards.” Steve straighted and stared fixedly down at his dick, his mouth open. “Like you’re always surprised to see it. Like, What the fuck is that thing?, every time. Or you could try a Jacob Sterner.” He took a step away from the urinal and bent his knees and leaned back a little. “Rainbow man. It’s like target practice with him. You can see him calculating arc.”

I nodded. We were well beyond the three minute limit, and I was dry, and someone was standing behind us, waiting. But we’d struck a rich vein of conversation, here, and I wasn’t about to pull out yet. “And how about Keith?”

“Keith! The pump action pisser!” Steve started bending and straightening his knees, his head bobbing up and down beside me. “He’s one of my personal favorites. And let’s not forget Valkyrie Bob.” That would be Bob Stephenson, who hummed Ride of The Valkyries while he was pissing, his voice getting louder and louder as the flow of urine rose to its cresendo, and then falling slowly, by stages, as it slackened to a trickle.

“And then there’s Tremor boy Tom.” Tom took the standard post-piss tap tap to an extreme, shaking his member like it was a rattlesnake he needed to kill. I mimicked the motion, my entire body trembling with the effort.

Steve laughed, and I laughed. I don’t think I’d every really laughed at work before. Eventually, Steve zipped up and nudged a tear from his eye. “Ah me. Yeah, pissing’s the best part of the day. See you tomorrow.” He stepped away from the urinal.

“Seeya.” I was putting everything back in its place when the guy behind me moved into Steve’s slot. I didn’t recognize him, at least not out of the corner of my eye. Must be new. He unzipped, then tilted forward, slowly, like the leaning tower of Pisa in the act of leaning, until his forehead came to rest against the tile. He closed his eyes, and opened his mouth, and his face slackened into an expression of pure, orgasmic joy.

Ooo, I thought. That’s a good one.

The space shuttle Columbia blew up today. Seven people died. I remember when Challenger exploded: they announced it on the PA at school, and it felt like a rabbit punch: it took the breath out of me, out of most of us, I think. I suppose you could say that more people die in a single day in this country in car accidents than have died in the entire history of the US space program, and you’d be right. Statistically speaking, this is a minor loss of life.

But the death of astronauts always seems to be more of a tragedy, somehow. Maybe because they represent the most audacious of our aspirations — maybe because they are in some way totems of our striving for new frontiers. The passing of those who contain within themselves the hopes and dreams of hundreds or thousands or millions is always felt more keenly, I think. John Kennedy, Kurt Cobain, Ghandi, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, today’s astronauts — they all meant something to a lot of people, and that something died a little when they did.

I think I’ve had about enough of movies basing major elements of their plots around impossible computer stunts. We just saw The Recruit, a so-so movie made unbearable by the dumb technical elements of its largely nonsensical plot. I knew it was going to be rough when, in the first ten minutes, our protagonist, a scruffy computer genius, demos his latest creation to a representative from Dell. Apparently, he’s bent the considerable weight of his intellect toward creating a program that can project an image from his computer onto the displays of several other computers on the same network. Re-routing data to a different display! That’s brilliant! Or at least it was in 1983, when X Windows came out. Now it’s just kind of … standard.

And it just got worse. At one point, our hunk-genius needs to perform a complex search for some super-secret CIA blah blah yadda yadda whatever, and so he logs onto a cutting-edge PowerMac hooked up to a lovely flat-panel LCD that can display razor-sharp images in millions of colors and types: ††WIN32_FIND("secret thing"); There are so many things wrong with this picture that it would take far too long to enumerate them all, but here’s a start: Why are they wrapping a command-line interface inside a retro-star trek UI? Why didn’t somebody in the CIA development labs think to come up with a menu option for Search? Why are they using cryptic API calls to enter commands? And, most of all, WHY ARE THEY TYPING WINDOWS CODE INTO A MAC?

Ugh. And it didn’t stop there, not by a long shot. I don’t want to give anything away, but the climax of this movie hinges on another stupid computer trick that is so incomprehensibly idiotic as to make even the most clueless AOL users stand up and beat their breasts in sheer outrage. And remember, these are the same people who consider their recent ability to sort email by column headings a quantum leap in computer technology.

Anyway. I know I shouldn’t begrudge these screenwriters’ their right to trample over good sense in the pursuit of good plot devices, but there are limits. The end of The Recruit rivals Jurassic Park’s sorry climax (a little girl computer geeks sits down at a terminal that’s displaying a bunch of vector graphic boxes in green outline against a field of black and gasps This is Unix. I know this!) in sheer nails-down-the-board irritation. These movie guys hire doctors to vet their medical assertions, don’t they? Lawyers to validate the tortial minutiae of lawyer movies, right? Why can’t they employ the services of a representative of the pocket protectorate to fix the computer bits in their scripts?

It would make a lot of sense. Imagine a typical conversation:

Script Writer: Hey Four-Eyes. Is it possible to transmit a virus through the electrical system?

Computer Geek: Well … no.

SW: Why not?

CG: [long pause] It’s just such a stupid question. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

SW:Well how about using a firewall?

CG:A firewall?

SW:Yeah. Maybe you could bootstrap the firewall to proxy the virus into your kernel.

CG:Um.

SW:Look, I’ve read about this. You can send viruses through email. Why not through electricity? It can’t be that much harder.

CG:Well, maybe if Microsoft ran the utility companies [chortling in self-satisfied geek fashion]

SW:Ok. We can do that.

CG:Do what?

SW:We can put Microsoft in charge of the electric company. [types] There, it’s done. Now can you transmit a virus through the electrical system?

CG:When it’s not crashing, yeah. I guess.

SW:Great. Thanks. Now, tell me again why you can’t write a program to disable all of the fire alarms in Uganda?

I’d be happy to be a computer geek movie consultant. Hell, I’d do it for free. That’s how much I care about the technical accuracy of American movies. That’s how desperately I want to be in the same zipcode as Sandra Bullock when she does the sequel to The Net. So consider this an opportunity, all you producers, directors, screenwriters out there. My services have been offered. If you need to get in touch with me, just do a Google search for computer geeks who want to meet Sandra Bullock. You shouldn’t get too many hits.