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Postcards of Rubble
The Pottery Barn Theory of Regime Shopping~~~~
Tom Friedman of the New York Times was on NPR this morning talking about his Pottery Barn Theory regarding the plans the US always has about taking down a government and rebuilding something they like better. You break it, you bought it. Do we really want to be responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure and government of another country, and setting up the first secular, oil-rich, democratically-elected, free/fair-market-friendly, Arab/US-backed government in the Middle East? That region has no model for that kind of state. Our ally states- whose leaderships were in no way elected in free/fair elections- will not be liking the new US outpost in their midst. Turkey- a serious military power and important US training ground- will have none of us as long as we're trying to make alliances with their arch-enemy, the Kurdish insurgent groups. The US and UK are poised to start ripping down this hopelessly complex and ancient set of structures in the middle of the Middle East, in Iraq. I'm not going to say anything about the atrocities of Hussein's regime (and how they've been exaggerated in the US press- see a blog by Tom Tomorrow addressing the infamous false baby-incubator-theft story), in any case I don't think this tyrant is something we can afford to break. And plus, according to international law, acts of unprovoked aggression by one state against the other are criminal.
Tom Friedman also pointed to the mess in Afghanistan, where the current leader survived an assassination attempt this past week. He collects postcards for his wife, and he bought her a pile of them in a hotel in Kabul. One postcard depicted "The Ruins of the Afghan Museum." It's like a joke. You know you've been at war too long when you are selling postcards of rubble. These governments we want to break have normalized a culture of constant warfare. Who are we to think we can end those cultures in a grand renaissance of freedom, democracy, and abundant human rights for all? This might sell to the mainstream press and public, but what genius really thinks we can actually do this in Iraq? Selling such a gameplan is like trying to sell office space in that pile of rubble north of Battery Park. Are we selling postcards of that yet?
What a silly question. I guess it's a consolation that some things still make me cringe. Oh goody, here's one that looks like one of those souvenir cartoon maps, like the one of Amsterdam showing hookers mooning the stoned locals, only this time it's cartoon buildings burning. Yeah, a "day of infamy"- where tragically HUNDREDS of cartoonists and graphic designers simultaneously had brain farts.
I found another blogger against the new war, and a slacker-in-arms, concerned that we have forgotten our original impulse in invading Afghanistan: read the comments by the Slacktivist.
As pointed to by my friend and another blogger against the new war, Interesting Monstah, read an anti-war activist information resource list from the Nation.
The Arm of Laocoon ~~~~
or, the Debut of the Slacker Stalker's Fractured Fine Art History (Pun Intended)
It turns out that if you can stick out the collective committee-driven creative process, you can lose a whole right arm and get it back again. Maybe not for 1,956 years, but eventually, you can get that first, best arm back. In the first century "before our era" (B.O.E.) (as the academic secularists in Russia still say instead of "B.C.") a committee of three Greeks, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, created a monument to the suffering of a Department of Psychic Works employee for the City of Troy who warned the devastated remnants of leadership to Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts (Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes!). He and his sons were killed in an accident while they were tidepooling (by serpents sent by the angry goddess underwriting the Greek effort), and the Trojans thought that was proof of malfeasance of that particular DPW employee, Mr. Laocoon, and proceded to solicit gifts from their enemy Greeks, who obliged. Troy was destroyed by the Greeks about 1184 B.O.E. Look at the face of Laocoon's monument and know the suffering of the passionate public servant hung out to dry by management. Meanwhile, the story of the monument. The statue was unearthed in 1506 O.E. when Michelangelo was on the gallery circuit, trying out his new "bag of rocks" muscle-bound floppy-wristed rentboy look in the medium of marble, and he got a look at the 1st century B.O.E. sculpture, which had lost its right arm. He came up with a theory of how the arm should look- bent backwards over the head- with a nice limp wrist. The owners of the galleries (failed artists) told him to stick to his girly pietas. Their non-union and probably heterosexual stooge, Mr. Montorsoli, glued a macho John Travolta disco-pointing arm on the figure in 1532 O.E. In 1905, B.C.E. (Before the Communist Era, when bourgeois sculptures were reconstructed by committee, ushering in the artistic school of Futurism), an archeologist was in a marble-cutter/ antique shop and discovered a nice limp-wristed arm, and he, a Mr. Ludwig Pollack, was a secret partisan of the Michelangelo School of Laocoon Armism - the MSLA (a turn-of-the-century kind of gay social club), so he knew that this was the original lost arm of that bereaved public servant, and so it was.
Mr. Laocoon was finally made whole again in 1957 O.E., after the fall of the Communist Facists (and their long-lived but unproductive Komitet for Creative Reproletarianization of Antirevolutionary Art by Propertarianists-- CRAPKOM) ...and after other partisans of the MSLA found the rest of the pieces that comprised the supporting fragments of the arm. It took them a long time because of the early-century invention of absinthe, popular among the Armists. OK, I made that last part up. Nobody knows why it took so long, except that every stage of this sculpture's life involved committees, and no doubt then committee meetings. Eventually the suffering Laocoon was made whole. Don't he & his son look happy about it?
I wonder why I can't find an on-line postcard of Laocoon. I guess that facial expression just doesn't say "have a nice day." Here is a PDF of a lecture on the real history of "Laokoon" (the metric spelling). Read a linked-up version of the story from the Tufts 'Perseus' network of Classics databases here.
Last Call~~~~
My girlfriend was hijacked by breast cancer, her body destroyed by disease, her mind by terror. After her diagnosis of involvement of bone cancer in her neck vertebrae on 9/11/01, we went shoe shopping. She responded to the terror of her diagnosis and the global paroxysms of terror after that date by trying to make "normal" happen as often as it could. She cleaned the house. She bought me small gifts. She made breakfast while I watched CNN. She kept me as close as she could, which meant not as close as before in some ways, closer in others. She stopped smoking her medicinal marijuana and she started to dream again. We stayed up late in eachother's arms talking about dreams. She called me the Sunday before she ended her life and left a message: "Hi baby. I'm just calling to tell you I love you, I really do. I'm ok. I hope you're ok. I'll talk to you soon."
Today NPR is playing excerpts from the Sonic Memorial to the Trade Center. The recordings of the last phone calls sound like that last message my paramour left me. Nonurgent, heartfelt, normal. These sound remnants are the aural postcards of rubble.
I kept that last message until Sprint PCS suddenly deleted it. It's too gruesome to lose the last recorded sound of a silenced voice, but like a postcard- you can only re-examine it so many times. It's hard to admit that I am more than the sum of my loss, and that this lost sound postcard is really not more than a postcard. Someday I'll let go of my anger at losing that last message, and their subsequent shittiness in their treatment of me in my distress, but for now I stoke a little fire in my heart and wish nothing but humiliation and disaster for a stupid cell phone company.
P.S. If you also hate Sprint PCS, you can post your complaints to SprintDidABadThing. I'm sorry that I can no longer find IHateSprint.com - which looked like the corporate site, except for the animation of a guy pooping on their logo.
