Anticoagulant

"You can do better sister. I'm married." Richard Conte, giving the Eisenhower era bourgeois a tutorial on the benefits of denial.


When I listen to the American left and its moderate counter voices go at it over a film like Zero Dark Thirty, I throw up my hands, if not in despair, then at least, futility. Kathryn Bigelow glamorizes torture, depicts it as no more than a video game, or she does not. We need new gun control legislation, and while we empower everyone, hey, civil rights is not a suicide pact, and potentially violent people like James Holmes need to be contained, so let's take a page from the affluent psychiatrist paraplegic who eschews his other classification as a wheelchair user and return to the good old days of involuntary commitment, while cynicism is the intellectual reserve of the mediocre, like the spastic_dowager, who has taken many risks to leave her scarred psyche bleeding in her amateur neuro image scan without quite crossing the border toward anarchy, which, even if I did, probably would not be taken seriously, while still cognizant enough to know that eradication has been done many times in the course of civilization outpacing our capacity to cope, and that after we get over this massacre, that genocide, we lose more definition, and so what is the use of being slightly more forgiving of Mussolini for being an inept projection of a virile thug. Isn't she funny, the poor little spaz, getting a little attention from Europe, Asia, in fascination? Mockery? Perhaps as a target of exploitation. You don't even know what horror is you little gnome, so why not be more positive and upbeat while the US is in its superpower status, however much it is diffusing?

We have short memories, whether in geological historical time or merely related to the course of human history, and I do not have to spearhead this, and could be nice, engage in the pleasantry of willful blindness and small kindness, when merited, I just have not dropped those dimes.

I have not seen my sister's eldest girl, Nicole, since the death of her granny. She is in a Catholic college now, and do not know what she makes of my rift with her mother, if anything. Stephanie shields her from me, afraid of what I might say about granny's past, or her own mother and father's, for that matter. The topic of my sister's pregnancy termination is a prime example, one of my searing trump cards; it is not that I want to hurt nieces or nephews, but merely that I must refuse the censorship of manner, politeness, merely due to this notion that kids don't know. Parents kid themselves about what kids do or don't know, and I may be wrong, and Nicole's children will live in a better world of radical equality of the kind that frightened Orwell, Huxley, in their totalitarian era.

If anything survives on this rock after we engineer ourselves into --*, natural evolution might want to give the lucky sentient horseshoe toss to the cuttlefish; yes, I know, that is misanthropic mediocrity crying uncle.

We all have better days.