Entries from April 2005 ↓

Ann Lomott, whose gentle advice to desperate writers is some of the best stuff I’ve ever read, has this to say about the radical right’s adoption of God as their personal mascot:

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do. The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God’s identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it’s the truth.

If I were a god, and I’d done a bunch of hapless beings the supreme favor of creating them, I think it would break my heart if they started justifying their nastiness by putting words in my mouth. Forsaking your god to do dastardly deeds is one thing; doing them in His name is quite another.

“I appreciate the leadership of Congressman Tom DeLay, in working on important issues that matter to the country.”

You can just see Bush saying it, can’t you? Slipping into his fake Southern accent, blurring syllables together, suppressing a smirk, struggling to strike the perfect balance between banality and condescension. The statement is meaningless, of course, verbal packing peanuts around the important stuff, the photo op of two stalwart Texans stepping off of Airforce One together, united in their valiant battle against liberalism, gayness, and the ravening forces of anti-theocracy.

But let’s parse the sentence a little anyway.

I appreciate the leadership of Congressman Tom DeLay …

There it is again: appreciate. He’s been using that word in the oddest places for the past four years. What does it mean, exactly? Is he saying that he is personally appreciative of the bugman’s leadership? Or that he appreciates/understands what it takes to be a leader? Or is he verbifying a noun: attempting to appreciate DeLay’s falling stock? Yet another aspect of our President’s unfathomable complexity.

… in working on important issues that matter to the country.

Issues like:

1. The silencing of the pernicious house ethics committee, which dared to slap him gently on the wrist (three separate times) for his wide-ranging ethics violations, the details of which are just coming to light.

2. The right of congress to pass a law targeting a single person, in an attempt to prevent her husband from releasing her from the vegetative purgatory that she’s been in for the past fifteen years, in the process countermanding the orders of every single judicial body who has looked into the case.

3. The responsibility of morally upright majority leaders to obliquely threaten the lives of activist judges who have the temerity not to go along with their hard right-wing agenda.

4. The absolute necessity of people in his position to stay in $700-a-night hotel rooms, in London, in between $5000 games of golf, in the course of a $120,000 trip to hold meetings with very current and extremely relevant “conservative leaders”. Like Margaret Thatcher. And then charge all of it to your scumbag lobbyist buddy’s credit card.

If I were the president of a country, I wouldn’t want to be seen anywhere near this guy.

I’ve had bad eyesight ever since I was a little tike. My first glasses were clunky, embarrassing things, always filthy and bent out of shape, and I wore them only when I absolutely had to. Sometime in the middle of high school, my optometrist introduced me to contacts, and I’ve never looked back.

Lately, though, my eyes have become inexplicably hostile towards these friendly, helpful little lenses, which have served me faithfully for so many years. They seem to be rejecting them. I fear that the era of contacts may be coming to an end for me.

That would be bad. I need my contacts. Why? Because, usually, my mornings go like this:

• I wake up, open my eyes, peer out at a hazy, indistinct world. Close my eyes. Go back to sleep.

• Some time later, my alarm starts beeping. I reach over and pummel every blurry alarm-clock-shaped object in reach until it stops. Go back to sleep.

• My dog wakes up, shakes himself thoroughly, comes out of his cage, turns on his back and shimmies along the floor for a couple of minutes, stretches, yawns hugely, shakes again, and then puts his paws up on the bed and presses his gargantuan snout up against my face. He whines until I wake up enough to let loose a stream of unspeakable obscenities. This does not discourage him in any way. Eventually, I open my eyes. Because of his proximity (he likes to get up very close), and his tenacity, he is often the first thing I see clearly in the morning.

• Finally, I roll groaning out of bed and move toward the bathroom, and stand under a tall lamp until I realize that it is not, in fact, a shower.

• I bump my way along a series of grey fuzzy shapes until I reach a brighter place with no carpeting. Fumble into the shower. Turn on the water. Stand under the water. Turn off the water, feel along the perimeter on the stall until I find a handle, slide it sideways, step out into the bright place again.

• I put in my contacts. The world comes into focus.

In the past, this sudden miracle of near-perfect vision has lasted until the end of the day, when I removed my contacts and crawled into bed. No longer. Now, at around 3:00, while I’m at work, the vision in my right eye becomes somewhat blurry. It is followed, in short order, by the vision in my left eye. And, as my contacts become portals of almost pure opacity, the characters on my screen grow blurry and indistinct, and eventually munge together into a field of muddy, particulate light. At this point, I have to stop working, and go into the bathroom, take my contacts out, hydrate them, and put them in again. This improves the situation for a while. But everything soon gets blurry again.

I’m about to try a new pair of extra-moist contacts, made for ornery eyes like mine. I have high hopes. But I also have a theory.

The adventure game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Infocom, came with a wonderful device called peril-sensitive sunglasses. These glasses reacted to the approach of danger by turning completely black, thereby shielding their wearers from the unpleasantness of seeing the horrible, terrible thing that was coming their way. (Later on in the game, you come across the Bugblatter Beast of Traal, one of the most fearsome, most vicious, most stupid creatures in the galaxy. You get around him by draping a towel over your head, so that you can’t see him anymore; and, since you can’t see him, the beast, in its extreme stupidity, assumes that it must not be able to see you either. And so it stops seeing you, and you make good your escape. That’s why Douglas Adams was a genius. But I digress.)

So maybe that’s what these contacts are: peril-sensitive. Maybe, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, on a workday, something terrible is about to happen, and it would be better if I didn’t see it. The question is … what? Is my computer going to crash, sucking away with it a day’s worth of work? Am I about to realize that my carefully crafted code is, in fact, a poorly-designed mound of doody-crap? Will I detect an infinite loop, and, in a freak moment of brain-computer synthesis, find myself caught in my own endless cycle, forever doing the same stuff, over and over again, with no memory of having done it before?

I don’t know. The contacts don’t speak. They just obscure.

Stupid peril-sensitive contacts.

Ever since George Bush ascended to the presidency, we’ve been mired in a sort of third-rate surrealist freakshow, a bewildering nightmare of corruption and cronyism and dark ideology that we can’t seem to wake up from. One of the effects of this situation is a sort of tolerance, among the general populace, for the lunatic funhouse our public policy has become. After years and years of being told that up is down, that left is right, that a plan to release more toxins into our atmosphere is a clean-air initiative, that waging a war on demonstrably false pretenses was not a mistake, that a man who approved a memo authorizing torture would make a good attorney general … we’ve developed a sort of hard shell, an inability to sense the miasma of complete insanity in which we’re moving. Our minds adjust themselves to their environment: when you’ve been slogging through the sewers long enough, you can’t really smell the shit anymore.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the confirmation hearings for John Bolton, our UN ambassador-delegate. Bolton is, of course, a frothing-at-the-mouth UN hater, a man who thinks that no one would notice if we took the top ten floors off of the UN building, and that the institution doesn’t really exist except as an instrument of the will of the US government. If he’s not the worst possible choice for UN ambassador, he’s certainly in the top five.

Which, I suppose, made his nomination inevitable. Bush doesn’t much like the rest of the world, and when he or his cronies aren’t invading it, or talking about invading it, they’re showing it their middle finger, and smirking.

So, yes. Bolton as UN Ambassador. In the upsidedown world of Bushland, it makes perfect sense. Nevertheless, the scene at the Senate confirmation hearings yesterday was almost surreal. There sat a man who not long ago seemed ready to rend the UN into tiny little pieces with his sharp pointy teeth, calmly saying that he wanted to restore confidence in the institution, and that the United States is committed to its success. The Democrats flailed impotently at the obvious (Biden: “I don’t who know why the nominee even wants the job”), but the obvious is passee these days. It’s all about the ceremony and shtick that precedes the inevitable, a kind of public ritual where the elephants in the room, in plain sight though they may be, didn’t garner much attention.

The only Republican who seemed at all concerned, pre-hearing, was Lincoln Chafee, but he looks like he’s going to get down on his knees with all the rest of them. After Bolton delivered his ridiculously disingenuous opening statement, Chafee complemented him on “saying all the right things.” Well, of course he said all the right things. Our executive branch hasn’t quite gotten to the point where they can come out and tell us what’s going on. They still need to hold up the occasional fig-leaf.

But I doubt they’ll have to do it for much longer. We’re entering the darkest parts of the funhouse now, where the mirrors don’t even pretend to reflect what’s real, and the lunatic cackling echoing off the walls might just be coming from us.

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Hello. I’d like to sell out, please.”

The old lady behind the desk looked up from the magazine she was reading and gave me a long, slack-eyed look. She said: “This isn’t selling out.”

“Oh,” I frowned. “The man down the hall said …”

“Selling out’s next door. This is tempting fate. You got any premature victories you want to declare? Health insurance policies you want to cancel?”

“Um. No.”

“Chickens to count before they’re hatched? Not-quite-dead dragons to mock?”

“No.”

“Then you’re in the wrong room.”

“I see. Thank you.”

She lowered her eyes to her magazine, and didn’t answer.

I went into the next room. The man sitting behind the desk had a large round head and greasy skin and a big smile that took up half his face, the top half. His eyes, which managed to be both beady and needy at the same time, looked up at me from just above his chin. “Hello!” he said. “Are you here to sell out?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, good,” He rubbed his hands together. A thin strand of saliva seeped out of his mouth and dribbled into his eyes, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “Good good good! What’ve you got?”

“Principles,” I said, sticking my chest out a little.

His smile sagged. “Principles?”

I nodded. “Lots.”

He frowned and said it again, distastefully, as if we were talking about shit sandwiches: “Principles.“

I drew closer. “I’ve been thinking about buying a big gas-guzzling SUV.” He looked at me, waiting. “Which is selling out to the auto industry, the anti-environmentalists, and the oil barons.”

“Uh huh,” said the man, playing with a stapler on his desk. “What else?”

“Well, I’m going to vote Republican for the next couple of elections, because I want to keep my taxes low, even though I know that the resulting deficit will destroy our economy.”

“Oooo,” said the man, pursing his lips and putting a hand to his mouth and widening his eyes. “Gee, are you? Are you really?”

“You’re making fun of me,” I said, wounded.

He snorted. “Principles aren’t worth jack shit, son. They should have told you that out front. It’s like trying to sell a used car lot the idea of a car. You’re wasting my time.” He leaned back in his chair, picking his teeth. “That all?”

I shook my head. “No.” There was lots more. But then I thought about it, and said. “Well, yeah, I guess it is.”

“Come back when you’ve actually done something with your principles, and you’re ready to undo it. Ok?”

“I will. Thank you.”

I went out into the hall. The lady in tempting fate was talking to a teenager who was staring doubtfully at a pack of cigarettes. A woman in a brown business suit brushed past me, moving briskly towards selling out. “They’re not taking principles,” I said.

She paused, looked at me, said: “Who is?” and kept walking.

In 1982, when I was still a couple of years away from owning my own computer, I spent a really embarrassing amount of time sitting in my room pouring over computer magazines, lusting after everything I saw: Commodore VIC-20’s, Apple IIe’s, Atari 800XL’s … all the old classics. I was a complete junky. I’d read the magazines into glossy tatters, and then pulverize them and snort the remains.

Unfortunately, none of this deeply distburbing monomania was being spent on anything useful: I wasn’t acquainting myself with the inner workings of the machines, or laying the groundwork for a career in the field, or turning myself into an indomitable computer god. I was mostly reading about games. Text adventure games, specifically: interactive tales of derring-do, in which you, mild-mannered computer nerd, were thrust into one perilous situation after another and forced to assume the mantle of a wizard, or a detective, or a privateer, and type your way past trolls and grues and dragons and mazes and all manner of insanely difficult puzzles.

I think I would have been even more intrigued by these games if I’d known how difficult they were to code. There was a time when .5 MHz and 2K of memory was state of the art, and any program you wrote had to work within those boundaries. It was sort of like trying to wedge a grand piano into an envelope, or write a novel on the back of a stamp. Skilled as those early programmers were, something had to give.

That something was usually the games’ parsers, whose job it was to interpret the commands that the players typed in. Most of the early parsers only accepted two words at a time, and you’d often spend as much time trying to phrase your command so the computer would understand it as you did figuring out what the command should be. A representative sample:

You see before you a long curving staircase. There is blood on the staircase. There is a painting of a vampire werewolf duchess on the staircase. There is a lantern here.

> Take lantern.

Taken.

> Turn on lantern.

I don’t understand.

> Activate lantern

You can’t do that with a lantern.

> Make lantern not be off anymore

You can’t not be off anymore the lantern.

> Break lantern

Everything goes dark. You are in grave danger.

> You mean the lantern was on the whole time? You son of a bitch!!!!

You are unable to mean the lantern was on the whole time you son of a bitch.

> Unbreak lantern

Something lunges out of the dark and eats you. You are dead.

> If you don’t bring me back to life right now I’m going to rip you out of this computer and tear you into little shreds so help me God.

You can’t rip you out of this computer shreds so help me God. You have scored 0 points. You are a Rank Charlatan. Press (R) to restart, (Q) to quit, (L) to load a saved game.

But the parsers improved over time, until, in the golden age of text adventures, when Infocom was churning out one superlative title after another, you could type long sentences in plain English with a reasonable expectation of being understood.

All that’s gone the way of the dodo now, alas. Text games are still out there, but only as a fan-sustained genre; all of today’s adventure games are slick multimedia packages, with lovely graphics, atmospheric sound, and non-textual, point-and-click interfaces.

I think that’s kind of sad. I like the pictures ok, but I prefer the ones I used to make up in my head.

I hate apples. I hate the way they sound when you crunch into them, I hate their loathsome bittersour taste, I hate the way the skin gets wedged in your teeth and you can’t get it out without floss or major surgery. I hate the way their vile, acidic juices eat away at the lining of your digestive tract until you’re doubled over with cramps, cursing life and unleashing uncontrollable applefarts. I hate their nefarious role in the advent of original sin and Snow White’s coma.

In other news: I like pears. Pears are yummy.