Killing Marilyn

Phil (in Germany) and I (here in Honolulu) having our weekly hour and a half phone talk last night, he brought up the subject of Marilyn Monroe's having been in all likelihood murdered, saying he's been reading recent writing on the subject.  And I, while I know nothing of the facts (actually, now that I reflect on it, I do have a certain recollection of the case--although I'm profoundly bored by it), said, "Sure.  If you've seen the video of her singing 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President,' you know she was out of control, and had to be put down.  Same deal as with Princess Di."  And we agreed that brother Bobby probably did the deed with his own hands.  Then we talked a little about what Golden People the Kennedys were--How Jack always made sure that the bimbos he screwed were willing bimbos, and how Jackie could make conversation in four languages flawlessly.  Jesus, those were the days. 

Mikheil Saakashvili--and Michele Leonhart, come to think of it, and not to forget Henry Kissinger

Who, despite, or because of, their flagrant, heinous, criminal turpitude, are dear to the Powers That Are, suffer almost nothing at having their crimes exposed.  Where nothing good can be said about such villains and their villainy the Captive Corporate Media say--nothing.   Jen Psaki, who has done such a marvelous job of not mentioning the butchery of women and children by the U.S. and its NATO allies, does no worse, or less, than NBC news or CNN or the New York Times.  

Amazing

If further proof were needed that the Butcher of the Donbas (Poroshenko) is a stinking piece of fascist shit, his late, personal appointment of the Butcher of South Ossetia, (Saakashvili)--"wanted by his country's (Georgia's) prosecutors for embezzlement, abuse of power and politically motivated attacks" (I quote the front page of Russia today)--to the governorship of Ukraine's Odessa Region, pretty much seals the indictment.  After this, let anyone dare defend the legitimacy of the Poroshenko régime!  Or, come to think of it, of any of Poroshenko's supporters. C'mon, Jen Psaki, say something nice about this!

Unfair perhaps--but you see what I mean:

Talking on the phone yesterday with a young, black, female (but perfectly nice and sympathetic) representative of my new damned insurance company--She was calling from Maryland, where it was already past six in the evening; hence her charming, but slightly surprising (to me here, at just past noon in Honolulu) greeting of "Good evening." We spoke in desultory fashion of insurance matters; then, our official business concluded, she felt free to ask me, anent her own inner vision of Terrestrial Paradise such as is so often evoked in those who live on the Mainland, by the words "Honolulu, Hawaii," "Is the sea really blue where you live?"  So I gave her the talk, on how that depends on which side of the island you're on--and how the blueness of water is inherent in the nature of water, if, of course, it's pure, as it is, for example, in certain bodies of fresh water that are found in Oregon, like for instance Crater Lake.  Which name I spelled out, as she had never heard of it--but she was evidently typing it into her computer as we spoke, because she suddenly stopped and exclaimed, "My heavens, that is blue!" Which, in her droll, southern black dialect, was a good four morae  of rising followed by falling circumflexion.  "Yes," I said, "And the picture you're evidently looking at doesn't lie.  That's really the color it is, as close as you can get to look at it--like sapphires.  There is nothing on the East Coast, or in the Atlantic Ocean, like it."  And without the least hesitation, she concurred.   

When did the Years Start to Slip away so Fast?

Certainly by the time I'd entered my fifties the acceleration had begun.  Which was what made the stunt (I can't deny that that's what it was) of going back to college in my late fifties so exquisitely savorous:  Time, perforce, stood still,  or took on another dimension, while I went from academic term to academic term--endless-seeming periods, wasteful and irrelevant in young lives, but the florescent temporalities of playful, jocund springtime in an old man's life.  The honors and awards--and the consistently high grades--that marked my progress through the mystic mazes of Academe, to me were only counters in a game that I was playing for fun...and profit....Well, and just a little bit, I must confess, in order to wreak Ineffable Vengeance on a System (the Way Things Are and Always Have Been) which, if I had been more credulous and trusting, or less faithful to myself and less plain damned lucky, would gladly and deliberately have devoured me early on. The horror and the infamy of the Sixties and the early Seventies, be it remembered, was not so much the shameful, utterly inexcusable military adventure in Viet Nam as such, but, rather, simply, the pure, unmitigated evil inevitable and inherent in the deployment for political purposes of an army raised in peacetime by compulsory military conscription.  There arose in me an anger, when in my freshman year at a land-grant college, I was compelled to take R.O.T.C., that was still only partially appeased fifty years later when the hopelessly hollow peremptory demands for "repayment" of the my college "loans" began to rain down upon me.  The one thing the vultures might have done to spoil my fun--hold up my grades--was obviated when, by a stroke of uncommon good fortune, some eight years ago, I slipped in a puddle of mop-water in a convenience store just down the block, and broke my left leg in three places, and was awarded $15,000 in an insurance settlement--of which I spent two thirds to purchase this the finest computer in the world, and one third, $5,000, of which I remitted to the University of Oregon in token repayment of my outstanding "debt."  A mere spit in the bucket of the $99,000+ owed and still accruing, but enough to evince my Good Faith, and to secure the release of my grades (3.92 GPA) transcript. 

Being Unfair

Until I was in my late fifties I had never seen the United States east of the Mississippi.  Then, thanks to the kindness of friends who invited me to stay with them, I lived for several months, winter though spring, in Connecticut/Massachusetts, and a  couple of years after that, from the first of January through the middle of July, I lived in Columbus, Georgia.  In both instances I saw wonders which I will treasure in my heart till my final expiration date:  The city of Boston, tout d'abord, is as delightful, charming and pretty a city as San Francisco.  At any rate, there is an air of similarity between Boston and San Francisco that would enable me to live comfortably in either, which is somehow like the livable air of Rome and Paris--and of Milan and Zürick, now that I think back upon it. Of course, as an American and a Transcendentalist, it thrilled me to visit Concord Village and Walden Pond and the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst. And to have heard the endless, prodigal, infinitely varied descant of a for-real mockingbird in April, in the heart of the ancient oak forest that is Columbus, Georgia, is to have experienced something so deeply meaningful and beautiful that there are no words to describe it.  

That said, with my delicate, western-bred susceptibility to atmosphere and humidity, I was never quite comfortable out of doors in the eastern United States--even in the sweetest spring time, the moisture in the air lay heavy in my lungs.  And I was shocked by the bitterness of winter in New England, as I was by the brutality, heat and humidity, of summer in Georgia.  Once about the middle of July, I walked outdoors in Columbus, Georgia, beyond the aid of life-supporting air conditioning, and finding myself utterly prostrated, I exclaimed, "O God, take me somewhere where I can be comfortable out of doors!"  And (firmly guided by my guardian sylphs) I bought a one-way bus ticket to Eugene, Oregon, where indeed, the first thing I noticed when I got off the bus, was that I was comfortable, and that I could breathe.

Being Fair

When I was a very small boy, of seven or eight years, living in the backwoods of western Oregon, and sometimes wandering through them alone and, needless to say, scared, there were, in fact, serious dangers in those woods--bears, cougars, coyotes--that I might, indeed should, have feared and sought to avoid. But instead, what I walked in terror of were snakes--which, except for garter snakes and the very occasional, easily avoided, rattlesnake, are virtually non-existent in the benign, temperate paradise of the woods of western Oregon.  Unlike, say, the Island-Continent of Australia, every square foot of which swarms or pullulates with the the most appalling variety of deadly venomous snakes in the world.  How do little Australian boys endure it?  Or Pakistani boys? Or Burmese boys? Well, one knows that some 50,000 Indians (mostly men) a year die of (mostly) cobra bites; while the Australian yearly death rate from snakebite is something like one every couple of years.  And the difference is that Australian emergency rescue services are extremely fast and efficient, while the comparable Indian emergency rescue services are virtually non-existent--and, more than that, Indian society in very large part, simply doesn't give a rusty fuck how many of its members die agonizing deaths from snakebite.

Atheism

In retrospect, I was fortunate--when, at the age of eleven, I formally, deliberately and for cause, at the end of a formal study or catechism of the Christian religion (taught me, with the explicit intention of  converting me to belief in that faith, by an accredited Protestant minister--nice Mr. Hamlin) instead of announcing my conversion, as I had implicitly, at the beginning of the course, promised that I would (Ah, those implicit promises!) when I should have completed the study of the Catechism--I declared myself, rather, a total disbeliever (fortunate, I say), that it was merely and only the childishly implausible, philosophically third-rate, intellectually disreputable, impossibly vulgar, unwashed peasant mess of a Christian god that I therewith foreswore my implicit promise to believe in, and not all gods, or any god.  Indeed I made quite a calculatedly infuriating (poor, nice Mr. Hamlin!) point of saying that, if I ever did need anything more than my own conscience and my own honest contrition and my own sincere effort to atone for my sins (in order to guide me in my moral course through the world), I would certainly far likelier appeal to one of the male gods of Olympus--Zeus, Hermes or Apollo--to "save" me, than to Jesus.  It wasn't really till I was fifteen or so, reading an abridgment of De Rerum Natura, with its magnificent apostrophe to Venus, that I completely understood that I was an atheist--a sound, sober, rational atheist at my heart.   And, for some reason, that made Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas (speaking of the Goddess of Love and Beauty as if she really existed), even more beautiful. With Lucretius at your elbow, despite his warnings against Cultus and superstition, you take an indulgent view of sweet, sad, beautiful implausible Mythos--It isn't till you dig a little deeper and read further afield, that it begins to dawn on you that, beyond leprechauns, and Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny and "Angelic Pow'rs," there are horrors and nightmares--Minotaurs and banshees and Goddesses of Death--swirling at the bottom of the Chalice of Delusion and Unreason. But fortunately, by the time I had to confront the historical and cultural fact of Kali (with her necklace of skulls, and her girdle of severed human arms, dancing on the corpse of Shiva in the Battlefield), I had already utterly, a priori, come to disbelieve in her--and to despise, as contemptible and far, far beneath me, the murderous and superstitious devotion of Thuggees.

The important point, about my having so early in my life dismissed the silly, morbid, cruel, neurotic and gratuitously unpleasant fantasm of Christianity, is that I never spent enough time among the Faithful to absorb (as, by osmosis apparently, the belief in such things is absorbed) the really strange things that Xians believe in without, quite, acknowledging or even consciously knowing that they believe in them:  The Devil, for example, and Eternal Hellfire.  These bizarre and deeply morbid convictions which most Xians do in fact hold steadfastly, and, somehow, communicate to one another--and which, in fact, they live, and die, in mortal fear of--but which are completely omitted (so far as I know) from their official catechisms, I have never, ever, entertained the slightest belief in--rather less even than I've ever, for one brief, moment credited the existence of vampires or werewolves.  I thoroughly enjoyed Bram Stoker's Dracula  when I was in high school, and willingly enough suspended my disbelief in vampires while I was reading it, but, unlike 'Twilight' fans, or most women, I find nothing sexy in the undead.

But, getting back to those imaginary, sleep-inducing (when enumerated) sheep whose care, at the age of eleven, I cheerfully relinquished to an equally fictive Good Shepherd--The happy consequence, of all of which scrupulous refusal to believe in things for which I saw no evidence, and which I felt no compulsion of conscience to believe in, was that I was never even tempted thenceforth to believe in things simply because other people believed in them, and that I found it easy (without necessarily fully realizing the radical depth of my perception) to recognize those whose beliefs were, in essence, given them from a consensus of other peoples' beliefs, and infallibly to judge them, without my always quite being conscious of so judging them, as moral lunatics--whose works are profitless, worthless, senseless and meaningless--and, for the matter of that, not seldom morbid and gratuitously unpleasant: Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, and Edgar Poë, not to mention William Faulkner, John Updyke, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy--and just about any contributor to the New York Times editorial page (except Frederick Crews and Vladimir Putin) that you could name.

Boldly I say so, having read little more than synopses of the works of those so dismissively named. Yet confidently I assert that it will be a pleasant, cool and dry day in Oxford, Mississippi before I'll read 'A Rose for Emily,' The Sound and the Fury, 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' or The Scarlet Letter.

What was the Crisis, the Appalling, Sudden Wrenching of the Human Spirit during the Beginning of the Second Decade of the Twentieth Century?

That gave us, first, the Iniquitous Income Tax, then the Federal Reserve (and with it, the same year, in Paris, the first performance of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps), and then the First World War? All of which led on, by a sort of doomed necessity, to the Espionage Act of 1917, to the bloody abomination of American Participation in the war, and to the Volstead Act of October 28, 1919, and to the flourishing of American Fascism under J. Edgar Hoover and Henry J. Anslinger.  What was the compulsion which drove us from prosperity and freedom to poverty, mass destruction and enslavement of our souls?  Just curious.

And, of course, just being curious, when I think of such lemming-like plunges of whole societies into what look, at first blush, like perfectly avoidable, utterly unnecessary cataclysm--I wonder if there were not perhaps other, less evident forces at work than the Powers Which supposedly Are. We know, for example, that much of the ill wrought by Woodrow Wilson was astoundingly subterfugitive, positively criminal in its underhanded fraudulence and extortion; this is usually evidence, in my experience, of the Mafia (Mob), and, behind them, of Flesh-eating Lizards from Outer Space.

The thing about these dusky Subcontinentals is they're very reluctant to tell us anything about themselves (They think we'll ridicule them)--and yet they're always, half-intentionally, inadvertently opening up and blurting out a flood of astounding information about themselves and the peculiarities of their existence that, despite ourselves, we can't help but find at least morbidly fascinating, if not utterly hilarious....

Case in point:  The minarets at the four corners of the marble plinth that the Taj Mahal sits on.  I quote from an online tourist guide, published by the Department of Tourism, Government of UP, Uttar Pradesh:

"Four minarets  each more than 130 feet tall, display the designer's penchant for symmetry is (sic) set at the corners of the platform of the mausoleum and complete the architectural composition.  They were designed as working minarets, a traditional element of mosques, used by the muezzin to call the Islamic faithful to prayer.  Each minaret is effectively divided into three equal parts by two working balconies that ring the tower.  At the top of the tower is a final balcony surmounted by a chattri that mirrors the design of those on the tomb.  The chattris all share the same decorative elements of a lotus design topped by a gilded finial.  The staircase opens through rectangular doors onto the balconies, and windows providing light and ventilation. Although these are covered with grilles, the interior is full of bats, which makes the ascent difficult because they react with hysteria to a person's entrance...."

Still, before we quite expire from politely suppressed giggles, we need to know:  Exactly how, in what manner, does the hysteria of bats make a person's (more particularly, we suppose, a muezzin's) ascent of the spiral stair within a minaret difficult?  God, yes, we need to know that.