Of computers and politics

Two totally unrelated observations:

1. It recently occurred to me that I never use my “personal computer” for computing. Does anyone else? I use it for word-processing, music-processing, and Internet access, but the closest thing to computing I do on it is to add up columns of financial figures, which has about as much to do with math as a grocery list has to with writing, or “Mary had a little lamb” with music. Very little of my Internet use is for porn, but a friend of mine recently admitted that he got rid of his PC because he realized he was masturbating to Internet porn up to three or four times a day and it was beginning to affect his life (not to mention his penis), although he credits his good prostate health to this. The bit about the use of computers was brought to my attention by a book I’m reading on the history of astrophysics, which pointed out that every advance made in that field during the 50s through the 80s was made by advances in the computers which were necessary to make the fiendishly complicated and tedious computations which are called for in that work. Those were the days when computers were used for computing. Among the personal effects I inherited from my father, who studied chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in the 20s, were a slide rule and a mechanical drawing set—old-fashioned heirlooms now, to say the least.

2. I may be accused of cynicism (how could anyone possibly harbor such a thought!?!) when I note the strangely muted reaction of the Republican Party to the news, broken during their convention, that the teenage daughter of the Republican nominee for Veep was knocked up “out of wedlock,” to use a quaint expression. (Why does wedlock sound so much like padlock? Even a little like hammerlock.) This is happening in the so-called “family values” party which usually considers unwed teenage mothers to be crack whores on welfare, probably knocked up by Democrats and liberals, and is being adroitly swept under the rug, although everyone knows perfectly well that if this had happened in the Democrat Party, the Republicans would be making hay of it. As it is, the Rude Pundit is predictably and characteristically making hay of Sarah Palin’s nomination, referring to the “repulsive cynicism of the selection of the obviously insane, stupid, and corrupt … Palin,” although Rude could make hay of someone picking his nose in public. I don’t know about “insane, stupid, and corrupt,” but it’s pretty clear to me that the woman has absolutely no qualifications for the office except that she’s a “social conservative” (duh!), which in the Republican Party now means little except anti-gay and anti-abortion (that’s their idea of “family values”), and maybe pro-guns and pro-death penalty. I haven’t heard whether she’s a born-again fundamentalist Christo-fascist, but that can safely be assumed without being stated. There’s something oddly fitting about the coupling of this politically correct nonentity with a doddering old carbon copy of the half-witted psychopath who has trashed and raped this poor nation for eight years. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone of normal intelligence could possibly vote for that pair. The answer, of course, is that there are millions of voters out there who don’t have normal intelligence.

Death of a liberal

My last post was a more than usually misanthropic snarl-rant which in retrospect might deserve a little explanation. I have long and rather proudly borne the banner of a curmudgeon and have even compiled a list of 102 pages of “Curmudgeon quotes,” most of it a meta-compilation of other lists compiled and published in The funny times by Jon Winokur. A curmudgeon is generally defined as a bad-tempered, stubborn, cantankerous, usually old person, and, although rarely mentioned in the definition, one often sharply critical of humanity. It is, of course, possible to be critical of humanity without hating it, but I’m afraid I’m increasingly tending toward the latter. I’ve gone downhill from the famous line of Lucy in “Peanuts”, “I love humanity, I just can’t stand people”; nowadays I can’t stand either one. Hence my statement in the last post that I no longer give a cent to any of the social welfare agencies I used to support philanthrop-ically. I’m no longer trying to make the world a better place; I’m getting more enjoyment out of watching it collapse in anarchy, chaos, and eco-catastrophe.

Now that we’re in the terminal spasms of that quadrennial zoo-circus we call, usually without the slightest trace of irony or sarcasm, “democratic elections” (one of the major spectacles of which will be staged in Denver this week; I can hardly wait to miss it), perhaps it might be useful to discuss what the above “death of a liberal” means. At first it meant the death of a member of the Dummycratic Party, which used to be considered liberal and is now nothing more than the center-right branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party. I deserted the Dummycratic Party (or officially recognized its desertion of me) back in 1997, after that treacherous scumbag Clinton (think of NAFTA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just for starters) won his second term. So, if one gives up on both of the two “mainstream” parties, what alternatives are left, in terms of so-called “third parties”? I blush to admit that in 1997 I changed my affiliation to Green. It sounded good at the time because I was just faintly more idealistic and naïve then. But after they ran that equally idealistic and totally unelectable clown Nader, who arguably made it easier for the Mad Emperor to steal the throne in 2000, I got fed up with them as well. So, what are the other alternatives? Libertarian? Not bloody likely. They’re in favor of minimally regulated laissez-faire economics, and I think all Big Bidness, particularly multinational corpse-orations, should be not only regulated, but chained, muzzled, and castrated. Socialist? That’s not even a viable party in the Divided States, and while I’m all in favor of the state taking care of such things as health care and retirement and unemployment compensation and social welfare generally, I’m also acutely aware of the hopeless incompetence of government bureaucracies to do anything right, and the danger of Government-as-Nanny deciding it has the right to interfere in everyone’s private lives and tell them how they should behave. All in all, the political landscape in the Divided States is a desert.

So my official death as a political liberal qua Democrat dates back to 1997, but my death as a cultural liberal is more recent. I share with my mentor Joe Bageant a withering scorn for all politics, politicians, and political processes in the D.S., but my death as a political liberal considerably pre-dated my acquaintance with his work. (Perhaps our scorn is more withering toward the Dummycrats because we feel so betrayed by them. More traitors in my history: In 1992 I voted for Ben Nighthorse Campbell as a Democratic Senator for Colorado, and in 1995 the asshole converted to the Republican Party. And more recently, even Mark Udall has turned out to be a gutless eunuch as a Democratic Representative for my district.) But I’ve also more recently joined in Bageant’s contempt for what might be loosely called the liberal life-style. Although philosophical liberalism—progressive ideals of reform and personal freedom and social tolerance and all that—still sounds good in theory, I’m getting increasingly disgusted with the kind of people who espouse it. Once again I’m indebted to Bageant, who has frequently railed against liberals as a social class, pointing out that the party which historically supported and represented the working poor now either totally disregards them or regards them with a sort of elitist disdain, and doesn’t even try to communicate with them about their needs and concerns. Even the Great Brown Hope of the Dummycrats committed the incredibly stupid faux pas of denigrating (pardon the pun) the fondness of the working poor for “God and guns,” two of the solidest pillars of redneck identity; I’m not sure he’ll ever recover from the damage he did to himself with that one. And the “party” of latté-sipping, brie-eating, Porsche-driving elitists is notoriously fragmented by warring “single-issue” factions—feminists, environmentalists, abortion-rights zealots, LGBTs, blacks, etc. (note the absence of organized labor in that list)—who pursue their own agendas with monomaniacal and uncompromising obsession and make little or no effort to unite with each other to form a stronger party, or with the rest of the country to form a more perfect union. But none of that matters much anyway. Regardless of which puppets of which branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party get “elected,” they’re all controlled by the corporate masters who own the government; some of them just conceal their thralldom more cleverly behind pseudo-liberal rhetoric. We hoped for improvement in 2007 after the party affiliations of the puppets changed, and look what happened. Nothing is ever going to change except the façade, and behind the façade things are only going to get worse.

Nuke the savages

The other day I heard on the news that non-government aid workers in some godforsaken asshole of the world have been murdered by the natives—again. And again, and again. And it suddenly occurred to me that I hear an awful lot these days about non-government aid workers in some godforsaken asshole of the world being murdered by the natives. And the question occurs to me: why do the aid workers even bother with these barbaric fucking savages if they not only bite the hand that feeds them but hack it off with a machete? I’ve got a real simple solution for such barbarity. Any time these fucking animals murder the people trying to help them, nuke their fuckin’ asses. Don’t just withdraw your workers, blast their worthless hides off the face of the earth. They not only don’t deserve to be helped, they don’t deserve to live. I’m sick of this shit. I used to contribute fairly generously to social relief agencies that did a lot of work in these shit-holes, and this year I haven’t given any of them a fucking cent. What’s the point of helping these vermin to survive when there’s too goddamn many of them anyway? If they want to gratuitously slaughter each other, let ’em go at it, and sell them more arms to facilitate the job. And stop healing their disgusting diseases. There are good evolutionary reasons why they’re dying like flies, and we shouldn’t be interfering with nature’s work. And in case anyone thinks I’m being racist in relishing the deaths of all these non-Euro-American persons of color, let me add that I am eagerly looking forward to the day, which is rapidly approaching, when millions of greedy, arrogant, lard-assed, profligate mother-humpers in the Divided States are gonna be weeded out by natural processes—some of which, ironically, will have been brought about by economic processes. I used to wonder if I’d live to see the shit hit the fan, not particularly caring if I lived after it hit. Now the shit-house is falling apart so fast that I think I may really be here to enjoy the show.

I’ve been reading too much Joe Bageant here lately.

I stand corrected

I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Other people are not nearly as enamored of this online encyclopedia as I am, but I often think that 90 percent of what I've learned in the last two years has been learned through it.

In my last post, "Beer thumping with Heisenberg's ocelot," I said that It's a wonderful life has never, "to my knowledge," been recognized as a story about parallel universes (I'm becoming more careful to stipulate "to my knowledge" in making more and more statements, now that I'm beginning to realize how limited my knowledge is), and that I considered parallel universes to be very different from time travel. Upon looking up the Wikipedia article on "Parallel universe (fiction)," it turns out, not surprisingly, that I was wrong on both counts. Wonderful life is indeed mentioned under the heading of "Movies," although the writer claims that "strictly speaking, the universes aren't parallel in that they cannot co-exist; rather they oscillate between one or the other"--a rather picky distinction, in my opinion. The article also includes a large section on "Time travel and alternate history," calling it "the most common use of parallel universes in science fiction." I'm glad careful readers of my fabulously popular and articulately intellectual blog don't point out more of my stupid errors; I might become discouraged from continuing to use it to bolster my fragile ego.

What is surprising is that Wilson's Schrödinger's cat trilogy, about which I was writing as a story of parallel universes, is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, even though the article devoted to the work itself describes the component books as "each taking place in a series of separate and slightly distinct universes." C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is mentioned constantly (as by rights it should be), but Wilson's trilogy never once. Nor is it listed in Wiki's "List of fiction employing parallel universes" (but then, neither are the Narnia chronicles). These are two of many examples of one writer of Wiki articles not knowing what is contained in other articles, which is a common criticism of Wikipedia. Rather interestingly, Wikipedia has a large article on "Criticism of Wikipedia," and after reading it, I'm wondering why I was ever stupid enough to read so much Wiki in the first place, let alone stupid enough to go around quoting it all the time. How many sites do you know that go to such extraordinary lengths to discuss what incompetent fuckwads they are? At the beginning of this post, I said I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Now I'm inclined to think I'll never refer to it again.

Incidentally, a Wiki search (well, so much for sticking to the last statement) of "Parallel universe" without "(fiction)" added gives a list of articles which includes not only the one referenced above, but one on the "Many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Needless to say, this is far too technical for a dumb-ass like me (example sentence: "Many-worlds denies the objective reality of wave-function collapse, instead explaining the subjective appearance of wave-function collapse with the mechanism of quantum decoherence."), and has nothing to do with my post on Wilson anyway.

Beer thumping with Heisenberg’s ocelot

Gosh all hemlock, three months since my last post! Kind of ran out of steam there. To begin with, scratch Time flies like an arrow; it aborted after only two chapters. No great loss. But how to explain the long silence? No explanation; no excuse. Blame it on entropy. It has nothing to do with entropy, of course, but I used to be obsessed with the idea that entropy was the explanation for almost all shit that happened. Second Law and all that.

I have several times referred to Joe Bageant, the passionately articulate socialist-redneck blogger whose social criticism I find so invigoratingly depressing. For quite a while his blog has consisted mostly of reader responses to his magnum opus, Deer hunting with Jesus (2007), and his counter-responses; in fact, the title of the book is also the name of the blog (although its address is simply www.joebageant.com). Most of the responses rave about how his book states with impassioned eloquence all the ideas the reader has had for years, and many readers from other countries (particularly Australia, for some reason) relate how the social decay which he describes in the Divided States also applies to their countries as well. But during all this time, well over a year, while I was reading what everyone else was saying after having read the book, I hadn’t read it myself. So a couple of months ago I corrected that deficiency and bought it (from Amazon; forgive me, for I have sinned).

Subtitled “Dispatches from America’s class war,” it is basically about life in what is usually called the working class, more or less synonymous with the lower class. Bageant himself grew up in Winchester, Virginia, which he uses as the paradigmatic example of lower-working-class America, and he frankly admits to having been raised a redneck. Somewhere along his journey, however, he picked up socialism as a political philosophy, thus making him that seeming oxymoron, a socialist redneck. (The journey incidentally included some time in Boulder with the likes of Timothy Leary.) Having achieved a modest degree of fame and fortune as an author, he came back to Winchester (which, like anyone’s home town, was no longer the town he grew up in), and the book consists mostly of the lives and experiences of his neighbors and fellow citizens, which are used to illustrate what he calls America’s class war. The various chapters are devoted to all the vulnerable and tempting targets of attack in American culture: shitty employment at the mercy (ha ha) of heartless corporations, corrupt mortgage rackets ripping off home-owners, the health-non-care racket designed to make the corporations rich at the sacrifice of the little guy. But there are also some scarily fascinating glimpses into cultural aspects slightly more indigenous to the redneck South, such as the gun culture which is such an important part of their social identity (hence the title), and the truly terrifying intersection of fundamentalist Christianity with fascist-theocratic “dominionist” politics. There’s also a chapter on Lynndie England, the soldier whose claim to fifteen minutes of fame was the picture of her leading Abu Ghraib prisoners around on a leash—just another innocent little lass raised in the white-trash culture of West Virginia just over the hill from Winchester, simply doing what any other good old red-blooded redneck would be glad to do.

More or less incidentally, he mentions here and there some of the many reasons working-poor rednecks have to hate yuppie liberals, and some of them are even reasons I hate yuppie liberals—and I’m closer to being a yuppie liberal than to being a working-poor redneck—an odd mixture which I believe some intellectuals call status-inconsistency. The main reason working-poor rednecks hate yuppie liberals is that the liberals not only don’t listen to the rednecks’ concerns or take them seriously, they try insofar as possible to ignore their existence. One of Bageant’s more amusing comments on the gulf between them is the observation that the supermarkets rednecks shop in don’t even have avocados or leeks.

A fundamental idea running through all this, without being the focus of any particular chapter, is the disadvantages the working poor suffer from shitty or no education. There are times when Bageant almost seems to imply that a lot of the problems would disappear, or at least be greatly ameliorated, by better education. But of course it has to be the right kind of education; the corrupt racket that public schooling has become, and its disastrous effects on kids (and the adults they grow into), are just more easy targets for attack. (How many people have pointed out the irony of the fact that the catastrophically moronic “No Child Left Behind” act was the brain-[sic?]-child of a president who was conspicuously left behind?) So all this is basically a rehash, from a refreshingly new and sometimes grimly humorous point of view, of all the social problems we’ve all been dismally aware of for years. Perhaps Bageant’s one truly original idea is what he calls the “American hologram.” As he himself describes it in one of his on-line essays: “Like a holographic simulation, each part [of American culture] refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts.” This may be a rather loose application of holography to social criticism, but it’s a novel statement of the way in which we are so enmeshed in the various aspects of the culture that it becomes very difficult to stand back from it or “outside” it and view it critically.

So, what does this have to do with “Heisenberg’s ocelot”? Well, the book I started reading after Deer hunting is Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy. I’m a very slow reader, so it will take me a while to finish and digest this rather large book, but I might make some beginning observations. Just to lay some groundwork for those of my thousands of readers who may be unfamiliar with quantum mechanics: “Schrödinger’s cat” refers to a thought-experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 which illustrates the quantum paradox of a cat which can be considered simultaneously dead and alive until a quantum event (the decay of a radioactive atom) takes place to “collapse” its state one way or the other. That’s an exceedingly oversimplified and perhaps even erroneous description for the two or three of my readers who may be familiar with quantum mechanics, but let it serve my purposes. A rather far-fetched application of the idea of “wave function collapse” or “state vector collapse” can be used to postulate the existence of “parallel universes,” in the sense that each such collapse creates two separate and parallel universes, one for each of the states that results from the collapse. (Forgive me; I really don’t know what I’m blathering about, and the Wikipedia articles on the subject are far too long and technical for me to wade through. If one of my readers knows better, he’s welcome to correct me. “She”? How many female quantum physicists are there around? Several hundred?)

As an aside, I might note that the classic Frank Capra/Jimmie Stewart film It’s a wonderful life has never, to my knowledge, been recognized as a story about parallel universes. That aspect is, of course, disguised by the fact that the idea is never mentioned in the movie, since “Clarence” the “angel” is one of the silliest nitwits in film history, and even “George Bailey” falls somewhat short of a rocket scientist. In addition, the whole idea of parallel universes was either new or nonexistent at the time the movie was made, and even if it existed in theory, it was almost certainly unknown to Capra. And the story involves characters going back and forth between universes, which is so rare, even in science-fiction, that it almost falls outside the genre. (Again, I may stand corrected, but note that I consider it very different from time-travel.) Far more common is the story where the universes exist parallel to each other but never communicate with each other.

Thus, the three books of Wilson’s trilogy (each of which is labeled “Book One”) involve parallel universes in which people and events are similar but different. As an example, “Justin Case” in Book One is “an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism”; in Book One he is “a mild, fortyish man who wrote excruciatingly intelligent music criticism”; and in Book One he is “a balding, nervous man who was living in a sociological treatise”—that is, he over-intellectualized in order to distance himself from people. Another example: Benny “Eggs” Benedict is a popular columnist for a New York newspaper in two of the books (different newspapers, different columns), but becomes Bonny Benedict (still a newspaper columnist) in the third one. Such examples could be multiplied, not only of parallel characters but of pun names—Bertha Van Ation, Natalie Drest, Juan Tootrego, Polly Esther Doubleknit, Carol Christmas, Marvin Gardens (a place on the Monopoly game board)—and references parallel to real people like James Joyce, and multi-layered puns like George Washington Carver Bridge (a historical person crossed with a bridge—itself a pun on “crossed”). The father of Markoff Chaney (a pun on “Markov chain,” a mathematical term) is Indole Chaney (a pun on a chemical structure).

Okay, enough multiplication of examples; you get the idea: Wilson loves word games, and so do I. Another of his more endearing traits is that he consistently refers to humans as domesticated primates, and to insects as the six-legged majority population. Lots of good ideas in this twisted view of “reality.” Maybe I’ll devote more space to it when I finish it.

Let me close with something totally unrelated to the above, but something I’d just like to rant briefly about. (Making up for lost time in terms of space here, aren’t we?) I seem to be hearing and seeing a lot these days about nasty people in history, most recently something on PBS last night about the twentieth century’s big nasties, Joe and Adolph, and their role in World War II. Well, I’m hardly the first person to point this out (I haven’t had an original idea in years), but it has often been noted that almost all of the really evil people in world history—the ones who are powerful enough to get into world history—were convinced at the time they were perpetrating their evil that what they were doing was for the good of their people. This would include not only Hitler and Stalin but also lesser ones like Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Slobodan Milošević (or, going back a bit, Bloody Mary Tudor of England, or all the Spanish Inquisitors)—some of these (and others who might be added) maybe arguably evil but certainly nasty—to a man, they were convinced that they were doing good, and the reason their morality is arguable is that a lot of other people (different numbers for different leaders) also thought they did good. (Notice that I did not add the Mad Emperor to that list. That’s a little ambivalent, isn’t it? He is certainly responsible for the collapse of American democracy, but so far he has not been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens—disregarding the Iraq war, that is.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is to reinforce further the oft-quoted maxim of advice: Be very wary of anybody who tells you that what they are doing or trying to do is for your own good. This wariness can start with your parents if you’re a natural-born skeptic, but is easily extended, with a little experience, to teachers, priests, doctors, politicians, etc. To begin with, there’s always the question of how they think they know what’s good for you. Good for lots of other people, maybe (and often not even that), but not necessarily for you. Almost always, their ideas of what’s good for people are dictated by some kind of doctrine or ideology which ignores or denies human diversity: the same things have to be equally good for all people. Be particularly wary of anyone who makes such claims on the basis of being an “expert.” Most “experts” are moronic assholes with trumped up credentials. Heed the popular bumper sticker: “Question authority.” Anything worthwhile I’ve learned has been gleaned from bumper stickers.

Respect?

I think Colorado is probably a leading state in its use of what are sometimes called vanity plates, which include specialized plates and personalized plates. The high incidence is no surprise in the People’s Republic of Boulder, at least, where vanity characterizes the prevailing mood and lifestyle. Personalized plates say something about you personally (duh!), like your initials or something clever, like 2TH DR (“tooth doctor”) for a dentist, or RODEKIL for an asshole (that one lives a block away from me). Specialized plates advertise some special interest or organization with which the owner is associated, such as one of the universities or colleges in the state, or various military categories and honors, or organizations like the Elks Club or the Knights of Columbus, or numerous other categories.

But by far the most frequent one I see says RESPECT LIFE. I was surprised to learn, on researching this on the Colorado DMV page for license plates, that this is actually intended to memorialize “the victims and survivors of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School” (the plate also includes a picture of the columbine, which happens to be Colorado’s state flower). This kind of takes the wind out of my diatribe, but I’ll indulge in it anyway. The basis for it is (or was) the assumption that most of the people displaying this plate were what is called “pro-life,” and I suspect that a significant proportion of those displaying it take the slogan in this sense rather than in reference to the Columbine shooting. This assumption seemed to be supported by a noticeably heavy presence of these plates in the parking lot of the Adventist hospital where I am perforce spending a lot of time here lately, as the “pro-life” ideology seems to be particularly associated with religion, and more particularly with right-wing fundamentalism or Roman Catholicism. And as used in this context, it usually means exclusively “anti-abortion,” which is a rather different matter than “pro-life.”

Now, I am no great fan of abortion; I accept it reluctantly only in cases of life-threatening emergencies. But the issue here is not abortion as such, but the use of the term “pro-life” to mean primarily, if not exclusively, “anti-abortion.” Those using it in this context are always referring to the life of what they sometimes call the “unborn child,” which to begin with is a contradiction in terms. If it’s unborn, it isn’t a child yet. A fetus is not a child. An embryo is not a child. (Okay, I may be splitting hairs on an arguable point, but humor me.) However, the term is used consistently by pro-lifers in talking about abortion because it’s emotionally loaded, and the people using it are appealing to emotionalism. More to the point, in focusing exclusively on the life of the fetus or embryo, they implicitly, if not explicitly, disregard any other sort or form of life, including that of the fetus after it is delivered. Are they in favor of free and readily accessible health care for the child after delivery? Not hardly. Do they care if the child whose life they have so zealously respected in utero is born into a totally unsuitable environment, enduring a miserable childhood, suffering from poverty, neglect, and abuse, and probably growing up to be a societal burden as a misfit or a criminal? Not likely. Do they respect the life of the mother? Maybe, but probably not as much as that of the fetus, and certainly not if her life is endangered by carrying the fetus to term and an abortion would save her life. Are they against the death penalty, a.k.a. state-sanctioned murder? Of course not. Are they against war, which is notably disrespectful of the lives of everyone involved, and of civilians who aren’t involved? That would be unpatriotic. Are they in favor of economic and environmental justice because injustice in these areas affects the quality of life of billions of people? I doubt it. Are they vegetarians? Probably not. In all these senses in which “pro-life” means far more than simply “anti-abortion,” they are considerably more tepid, if concerned at all, about any life but that of the “unborn child,” nor even about that after delivery. And they call that “respect for life.”

How about respect for intelligence? Can I customize a plate that says RESPECT INTELLIGENCE, with a picture of a brain instead of a columbine? Life can get along quite well enough on its own with little or no help from me; in fact, in view of the catastrophically exploding world population, it’s getting along all too well. But intelligence needs all the help it can get and suffers continual setbacks. As I suggested in an earlier post, the reason so many people voted a blithering, psychotic halfwit into the presidency (or came close enough to doing so to give him a chance to steal the election) is because so many of them are blithering halfwits themselves; they got what they deserved. But the people with intelligence didn’t; they deserved better. But they’re in a distinct minority, and we know what happens to minorities and their opinions in a “democracy.”

If I’ve been unfair to pro-lifers or inaccurate in portraying their attitudes, tough shit. All’s fair in polemics. I’ve always been bad at debating because I consider anyone who disagrees with me an idiot.

By the way, for the first two chapters of the greatest literary masterpiece of the last week, click on “View my complete profile,” and on the profile page, click on “Time flies like an arrow.” I’ve already bogged down after two chapters (only one of which is even vaguely narrative) because I haven’t decided yet what I want to write about. The Muses have already deserted me. Probably went to a museum.

The next great American novel

A couple of days ago, I ran across (again) a book called It was a dark and stormy night: The best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton contest (Scott Rice, compiler, 1984), which is actually the first of five “dark and stormy” compilations, as the Bulwer-Lytton contest is held annually and thus continually creates new entries. The title, immortalized by Snoopy in the “Peanuts” comic strip, is the first line of Paul Clifford, one of the more than 150 books (most of them pot-boiler novels) written by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and is taken as exemplifying a particularly bad opening sentence for a book (to begin with, nights are dark by definition, so the word is redundant). The contestants are invited to “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” (or the worst of all possible opening sentences). Hence, obviously, the question mark after “best” in the subtitle—i.e., the best of the worst.

The entries are, of course, parody, but the subject of bad writing is interesting in itself. Generally, there are two sorts of bad writing: that written by bad writers who think they’re writing well (among whom we assume Bulwer-Lytton himself falls), and that written, like the contest entries, by writers, arguably more or less good, who are deliberately trying to write badly. Moreover, the whole question of value judgments embroils one in the murky swamps of literary criticism and tastes, in which it is instructive to learn that B-L himself was very popular in his heyday and therefore evidently not then considered a bad writer, or at least not by the literary rabble who themselves had bad taste in reading. (See, the style is treacherously easy to fall into inadvertently if you’re not careful, which I almost never am.)

It is surprisingly difficult to write badly well; it takes a certain sort of good writer—a parodist, obviously, but good parody is itself surprisingly difficult. (Incidentally, my favorite “newspaper” is The Onion. For the cognoscenti, nuff said.) Parodic opening sentences may be one feat, but entire novels written in parody are quite another. A Google search shows that there are actually quite a number of them, parodying various genres of “serious” writing. Perhaps the easiest to parody is the romance novel, which for most people of any taste is almost a self-parody to begin with.

So, why am I mentioning all this? Because, as the preternaturally prescient of those among my readers have doubtless surmised by now (I love doing this), the next great American novel will be written by none other than le grande moi. And by what appellation will this monumental epic of love and adventure and silliness be identified? A search of the Library of Congress database reveals, to my astonished surprise, that they have no publication on file entitled Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. How could such an obvious title have escaped exploitation for yea e’er so long? The line has been attributed originally to that great master of comedy, Groucho Marx, and has long been one of my favorites. Naturally it has nothing whatever to do with the subject of my masterpiece, whatever that may be. After all, to begin with, writers are supposed to write about what they know from experience, and I have had practically no experience in either love or adventure, though a great deal in silliness. But I should probably count myself among the first class of bad writers, i.e., those who think they’re writing well, and now I must try to carve my niche among the second class by writing badly deliberately rather than carelessly.

Ah, the throes of creative agony! Oh, the agony of creative throes!! Alas, the agonizing throe-ups of creativity!!! And what stunning cast of dramatis personae will populate this dazzling saga? Well, I’m thinking of people with names like Shirley Knott, Lance Boyle, a cook named Jasmine Rice (who, while working in the kitchen, sings things like “I lost my sugar in Salt Lake City, But my pepper grinder still does the doo-wah-ditty”), a priest named Benedict Q. Vainete, another religious named Gloria Pottrie, an unpleasant character named Dick Head—you get the drift. Talk about being done before. Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy has Justin Case, Bertha van Ation, Juan Tootrego, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, Markoff Chaney (a pun on an obscure mathematical term), and Marvin Gardens (one of the spaces on the Monopoly game board). “Click and Clack,” the Car Talk guys, give “official staff” credits to literally hundreds of puns names (www.cartalk.com/content/about/credits/credits.html) which are doubtless copyrighted; I hope I’m not infringing on any of them, but I haven’t read through the whole list.

And when, you ask (indeed, you must be earnestly searching for an answer to the longing query), will the breathless throngs be blessed with the first of lo! many installments in this avidly anticipated tale of passion and action? Ah, the muses must whisper their inspired counsels into my shell-pink otic aperture, or implant them directly by telepathy into the convoluted mush of my prefrontal lobes, before first I lay finger upon my Macintosh keyboard to bring this soul-stirring saga to fruition. Short answer: probably a few weeks. I may, in fact, devote a separate blog to it. Not sure how to do that in Blogger. Watch for it.

It was a stark and dormant blight . . . It was a quark-informing flight . . .