WriteOutLoud

Baby Wipes

All one word, evidently--"babywipes."  They are the commodity of choice among the American troops on the ground in Iraq.  Not chocolate, not cigarettes (they have plenty, and smoke like it's their only pleasure, which it is), not porn.  Babywipes.

It's the only thing that gets the sand out of their pores, the 24-year-old lance corporal explains, showing me a digital photo of himself on the road to Fallujah after having been out on patrol somewhere else for three weeks with no showers, no fresh clothing.  Darren weighs 183 pounds stripped, 309 with full field gear, and his expression in the photograph is grim.  "You look like you have sand growing out of your face," I cautiously observe.  "I do," he replies.  "The grains work their way into your whisker follicles, then grow back out.  Hurts like hell.  Only thing gets it out is Babywipes."

It's another wine-tasting scenario like all the rest:  two young, hollow-eyed guys, 21 and 24, come in all straight and proper and high and tight in their civvies, and I bust them instantly, announcing to whoever's around that "the Marines are here!"  And once again, their money is no good, everyone's shaking their hands, hugging them, calling them heroes, thanking them for their service.  They are bewildered but gracious.  I can't help comparing these guys' reception to the one that awaited so many returning Vietnam troops--showers of garbage at Travis AFB, hoots and hollers of "Babykillers!" etc.

Darren and his buddy invite me to spend my ten-minute break with them, outside.  They want to talk.  They don't know what they want to say, exactly, but they want to be heard.  They want to tell someone that they never got more than an hour and a half of sleep per night, over there.  That they could go from dead asleep to full field gear in 5 minutes.  That they could break down and reassemble their M16s in their sleep, and did.  They have mixed reactions to Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's book (they are in the same company Swofford was)--the younger one's in the midst of reading it, while Darren claimed at first that he didn't like it, but went on to explain that that was because some of the true stuff isn't true any more (being forced to put on shows of solidarity and morale for brass), and some of it was so true, he couldn't read it, had to put it down.  When he gets back home for good in two weeks, he's going to 14 months of school to become a massage therapist.

A what?  Babykillers to babywipes . . . is something going on here?  something GOOD?

--And Now THIS!

                      

Though I am rarely at a loss for words, I couldn't even splutter yesterday when LOML told me on the phone that Condi's getting Colin's job.  "You should like that, right?" he nudged, baiting me--our moratorium on political discussion evidently having developed a glitch--because she's female and African-American.

If I hadn't just finished Edward P. Jones's The Known World after struggling with it for a whole week (I usually inhale a novel that length--388 pp.-- in a day and a half, tops), I might have been less horrified.  But last year's winner of the Pullet Surprise had just taught me something new, something awful:   there were black slaveowners in the American South.  Black people came to own black people in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, some of them relatively innocuous, I guess, like individuals being allowed to work for pay off their owners' properties, earning enough to buy themselves free, then earning enough to liberate their family members.    That's capitalism at its most noble, I guess.

The family relationship functionally effaced the legal indenture, but they still "owned" each other.

Other antebellum African-Americans ingratiated themselves with their owners, bought themselves free, set up their own plantations, bought their own slaves, and worked them just like white people did.

Jones tries hard to explore these relationships and their effects on the souls and spirits of the people involved, but The Known World isn't a very good book.  Though the critics on Amazon.com almost uniformly protest that the book "has too many characters" (47), the size of the population isn't quite the problem.  Gone With the Wind is nearly three times as long (1024 pp.) and has nearly three times as many characters (127), but any reasonably alert GWTW reader retains a distinct impression of each one (including little Willie Kennedy, whom we never see, just hear about) long after Rhett has told Scarlett that he doesn't give a damn; we're able to do this because Mitchell delineates their characters so deftly, so fast.  But by about p. 50 in The Known World, I had to start flipping back to the "Dramatis Personae" appendix, trying to remember who was who, and what their story was, and I had to keep this up for the rest of the book.  Not good, the wrong struggle for a reader, and a problem exacerbated by downright sloppy writing:  often foggy pronoun reference, for example, plus Jones just not being quite up to the task of creating a linear narrative in non-linear form.

But I kept going because the ideas were so startling, the situations completely plausible and so disturbing, and there did seem to be a character crucible at the bottom of it all:  Jones does seem to have a point:  some freed slaves would rather die than sell out their brothers and sisters, while others blithely joined in their exploitation, for their own profit.

Brilliant, articulate, savvy Professor Rice has made a career of doing just that, and not only of colluding in the exploitation of African-Americans, but also of women; she's built a career out of betraying her ethnicity and her gender.  While Provost at Stanford, she used her powers to abolish admissions quotas.  Now she's maneuvered the highest-profile, indefatigable African-American Good Soldier out of her way in order to wield even more power as the Official Apologist for the radical Right, whose agenda creates more poverty in order to keep the rich rich and make them even richer; stomps on the Constitution by doing its best to obliterate the distinction between church and state; lies to the world in order to wage a war for profit; wants to eliminate women's control over their own bodies--need I go on?

More than once, Professor Rice has been heard to say that the job she really wants is Commissioner of the NFL.  Now that, I could go along with.  She could be in charge of all colors of big men (and no women!), pounding each other to mush for profit--their own as well as their owners'.  If she were running the NFL instead of the Armed Forces, we could see what she was doing.  We'd know which knobs she was turning, as we did when she was at Stanford.  Now, though, behind closed doors with Dubya--where she's been for the last three years, but now they're the only two in the room--there's no telling what she'll get up to.  But we know who will pay, don't we? and who won't.

Just A Shopgirl II: Deep Thoughts

Six weeks on this "pour-girl" winery job, and here's what I've learned:  it is impossible to smile and yawn at the same time. 

At the bookstore, I worked my ass off for 8-10 hours at a stretch on concrete floors, but I was working for friends.  For people who know me, know what I'm capable of, what I'm worth, what I'm good at (and what I'm not so good at:  counting [anything]).

Here at the tasting room, though, where no one I work with has ever indicated the slightest interest in who I might actually be, I "talk to customers too much."  "Don't clean [i.e., polish crystal] when people are in the store." ["Uh-huh.  And when they've indicated they don't want to be bothered, how should I look busy?"]  Sales are down from this time last year--quelle horreur!  Could it be that people don't have quite so much disposable income, what with the economy and all?  Naahhhhh.  The shopping center is flooded with folks, but they're all going to the movies or eating dinner or both; they're not buying wine on the way either to or from.  They bunch up outside and ogle the $250 Riedel crystal decanters in the windows (and me, polishing), but they don't actually come in, most of them.  They're intimidated, and rightly so.  Or they're just too smart.  Most of what we sell is available for much less, elsewhere.  Like oh, Trader Joe's or Cost Plus.

But according to Management, we worker bees just aren't doing our jobs!  Bottom line: we're not Selling Enough Wine.  So it's Our Fault.   Short of launching ourselves out the front door, tackling folks and dragging them in, what should we do? we wonder.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we should tackle them and drag them into the store.  Management has these 2-for-1 complimentary promotional winetasting cards, and someone should go out among 'em, the Great Unwashed, and hustle up some custom.  We worker bees all stare at each other--or, rather, all my fellow worker bees stare at me.  Moi?--yup, vous!--(pas "toi," parce-que nous ne sommes pas les egales, ici)--should go out among 'em and hustle up some biz.

I pretend to be a little shocked, but I'm really thinking, "Oh shit YES, anything to get OUTSIDE and WALK AROUND!"  So I take a handful of cards and sally forth.

I head straight for Cohiba, across the way.  More than a cigar store (no wooden Indian in front, for instance), it's a cigar boutique, a small storefront operation featuring a stylish inventory of cigars in a stylish environment in which to set said seegars on fire and suck on them while striking postures of exaggerated machismo:  sumptuous leather sofas, a few bar-style perches, torch-sized propane lighters, bigscreen TV, mirrors all around.  And a spectacularly hard-eyed proprietor in the best seat in the house.

Effortlessly at home in this all-boy environment, I ask him "You still here?"   He's so startled, so caught-off-balance by this sudden so way-cooler[not to mention taller]-than-he-is big blonde,he has no reply.  So I ask the 300# bouncer whether I can solicit custom; he says sure.  I work my way through the testosterone fog of blistered tastebuds--"You like wine?" I ask.  Ever so eager to appear hip and cool, to a man (and one woman) they reply Yes, yup, you bet, Baby, we do!  Well then, come on over! I suggest, handing out cards.  Ten of them.

In the next hour, eight of the recipients show up at the winery.  Of these eight who can't possibly taste anything, six spend more than $150. 

"How did you DO that?" a co-worker (not Management) asks.  "I don't know," I respond, shrugging.  "Musta been something I picked up in graduate school."

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Fallujah

That swish-swish sound you hear?  That's me, rubbing my hands.  This whole flap over Spielberg's film and whether to show it on network TV (1) on Veteran's Day (2) during a war--vs. damning the FCC torpedoes--is just too juicy; I cannot resist. 

The precipitating event is a few entertainment conglomerates (most of which I've never heard of) yanking Saving Private Ryan from tonight's Veteran's Day broadcast schedule, all thanks to Janet Jackson and oh yeah, Bono. 

J.J. accidentally-on-purpose flipped her right nipple at us during the Super Bowel--oopsie!--and Bono got so enthusiastic about a music award that he actually said THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT! on network TV, causing the networks involved to be hugely fined by the FCC for "obscenity."   Quelle horreur, etc.

Evidently (nipples being not so much in evidence), the language in Private Ryan is the issue; apparently, the actors in this film actually use the actual language that actual soldiers use in actual war.  Quelle horreur, again.  And then there's some other mumbly stuff on CNN about whether American Folks At Home can stand seeing such graphic representations of the activities their sons/lovers/brothers/husbands are currently engaged in, over there in Fallujah etc.

Here, at the tail end of the argument, is where I get excited:  the collapse of distinction between language and violence, as to obscenity.  Apparently--and I hope I'm not overstating the case--somebody in charge of these nobody/nowhere outlets suspects that the sight of American forces--primarily enlisted men, calculated sacrifices for "the greater good"--drowning in their own blood on Omaha Beach might be deemed by the FCC as being as obscene as hearing the survivors say fuck. 

Well, boys and girls, it's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern all over again, and that's why I'm sooooo gleeful.  R&G are the Two Stooges of Hamlet--his college roommates, recruited by Claudius, Hamlet's uncle/stepfather to betray their frat bro.  But our hero, the Prince of Denmark,  gets the drop on his drop-in buddies in this exchange:

H [to R & G]:  My good lads!  How do you both?

R:  As the indifferent children of the earth.

G:  Happy in that we are not overhappy.  On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.

H:  Nor the soles of her shoe?

R:  Neither, my lord.

H:  Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?

G:  Faith, her privates, we.

H:  In the secret parts of Fortune?  O, most true!  She is a strumpet.

In other words, "Gentlemen, you're about to get fucked."

In 1928, a WWI veteran named Frederick Manning, who understood the meaning of obscenity as it pertains to war, wrote a memoir/novel of his experiences in the trenches, called Her Privates, We. 

Decades later, Ernest Hemingway, himself a WWI vet, had this to say about Manning's book:  "Her Privates, We is the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read.  I read it over once a year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them."

Her Privates, We is still in print, I'm happy to tell you.  Has the FCC read it? or are the hinterlands just afraid it has?

OK, So This Isn't Going So Well--

Whoa, I'm horrified not to mention impressed by just how bummed-out We still are, a whole week after The Last Erection.  Almost everybody I know and love is just barely crawling across the floor, so heavy is the weight of our communal disappointment.

Today, for instance, I'm thinking about the conversation I had with my therapist-friend yesterday, in which she did most of the talking.  We've worked together for almost ten years now, and she has never ONCE interrupted me or volunteered her own feelings.  But yesterday she just could not shut up about how miserable she is, faced with Another Four Years of Shrubbery:  Iraq, Roe v. Wade, church/state, education--it's all down the shooter, far as she (and I) can see.  We're both glad we don't have children, and glad we know some of the children we know, who are doing great, subversive things in education, politics, etc etc.

Her one sunny thought/hope:  that the current leader of the free world will either have an acute health crisis, or step in his own excrement, a la Nixon, who only made it 16 months into his second term thanks to his own perverted perfidiousness and that of his closest associates.   I'd be perfectly happy for  Dubya do likewise, and go slithering back to Crawford with his Dick, where the two of them could spend the rest of their days dovehunting or making model ICBMs or whatever the weeping jesus they do down there. 

Perhaps the two Best Buddies would be out hunting one day, and perhaps they would simultaneously mistake each other for deer--hey, THERE's a thought!  I would be satisfied with the result.

Which reminds me of autumns in Aspen, where I was when Nixon resigned and where, every October, the dumb-ass Texans would come roaring through town in their Cadillacs and silly fluorescent outfits, headed up Independence Pass to hunt deer, which they would duly murder in whatever possible droves, then strap the lifeless hulks to their front bumpers, twirl around, and come preening themselves back through town. 

Alas, however, los Texanos (sorry, TLJ) were not hunters enough to know they ought to dress out their kill--which is to say they were not hunters, really, just nitwits with firepower but no idea how to deploy it.  So by the time they got to oh, say, the Hotel Jerome (in the center of town), the poor lifeless quadrupeds would be stinking so bad that the aforesaid dumb-asses would pull over in front of the newspaper office, yank the corpses off their bumpers, whip out their Bowie knives, take the racks, and motor off, leaving the rotting remains for us locals to clean up. 

That's not all.  "Texas Manners," we used to call it, when we'd spot some jerk (usually short) in a Stetson (usually tall), standing wobbly in the middle of Main Street at 1 or 2 AM, relieving himself of the evening's takings.  I made a practice of sidling up next to these leakers (invariably Texans), who didn't quite notice they had company till they jumped about a foot in the air when I politely asked, from about three inches away, usually behind an ear, all breathy, "Excuse me, sir, but would you like ME to come down to Plano/Dallas/Houston[pick one] and do THAT" [looking eloquently at the puddle in front of us] "in front of YOUR house?" 

Dang but those those pseudo-cowboys looked silly, standing there with their units in their hands, all startled by this big, mouthy blonde checking out their goods and looking them in the eye.   Pretty much like Dubya looks, most of the time cameras are on him. 

For all I know--and I have no reason to suspect otherwise--one of those pissing idiots is now President of the United States.  Again.

Who Are WE--

--who are fucked by the results of this election? 

"We" are women; same-sex lovers; so-called "ethnic minorities"; deeply spiritual yet non-Christian; believers in the separation of church and state; i.e., the disenfranchised, the cast-out, the underclass, the working class.   And everyone who, by nature,  identifies with these clearly-defined oppressed groups; those of us whose sympathies are with those whose voice are least heard, least heeded. 

We despair. 

My Opinion

Shooting Fish in a Barrel: This Year's (or Century's) Ghastly Analogy Award

"War is a come-as-you-are party," said Lt. Gen. C. V. Christianson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, in an interview yesterday. "The way a unit
was resourced when someone rang the bell is the way it showed up."

A party? Iraq is a PARTY?

Shame on you, Gen. Christianson. For shame.

He is explaining to The New York Times why the 1544th Transportation Company of the Illinois National Guard, and the 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard, among many other troops on the ground in Iraq, are wearing Vietnam-era flak jackets instead of Kevlar vests, and driving around the hottest spots in the war in un-armored vehicles. What he is saying amounts to, "We just didn't have time to outfit our people properly. Tough shit! That's the way it goes."

The Times tells us further, "Relatives of the soldiers offered to pay to weld steel plates on the unit's trucks to protect against roadside bombs. The Army told them not to, because it would provide better protection in Iraq, relatives said." But it hasn't provided any better protection, and their kids are dying in disproportionate numbers. So the folks at home are taking up collections to remedy the Army's irresponsible shortfall.

This bloviating swine general obviously has never been to a real come-as-you-are party. They work like this: a bunch of your friends show up at your house unnanounced, at some time of day or night when you are most likely to be in your pajamas or a pair of ugly shorts and no makeup, and they whisk you away to the party they're throwing. Everybody is surprised and a little embarrassed, but pretty soon everybody relaxes, has a few brewskies, and a nice time is had by all once the shock wears off.

This is NOT what we're doing in Iraq. What we're doing there amounts to a whole bunch of heavily-armed strangers bursting into your house in the middle of the night, blowing it up and killing your whole family. If you survive, the shock never wears off.

I see proof of this nearly every day in the tasting room, where my favorite customers are Marines recently returned from the war. They come down from the base at Twenty-Nine Palms in pairs or larger groups, sometimes with their wives. Most are just barely old enough to drink and have been stateside less than a month. Even in civvies, they would be conspicuous for their high-and-tight buzzcuts and their rigid posture, but I also recognize the look in their eyes, the "thousand-yard stare" from Vietnam days. They're shaky, ill at ease, not quite sure they're really home and safe and standing in a tasting room, learning about wine.

Yesterday, for instance, the doors flew open and here came two of them--big, handsome kids, early 20s. I announced, sweetly but loudly, to the half dozen or so customers already at the bar, "OK everybody, we're safe now--the Marines are here! Come on in, boys!" They stepped up to the bar and explained that one of them knew something about wine, but his buddy didn't, so he was being introduced "to the finer things in life!"

Doing their setups, I asked--gently, knowing the answer--whether they were "just back?" "Yes, Ma'am. Three weeks." Everybody at the bar listened up. "You don't have to 'Ma'am' me, Honey," I replied, "I'm working for you, here!" "Well, yes, Ma'am, but Ah'm from Texas, cain't hep it!" "And your money's no good here, Son," said a gentleman from Oregon, extending his hand. "Thank you for your service. I'm so glad you're home safe." Hands shaken all around. Wine tasted, explained, savored. Conversation a little stilted, everybody careful not to ask what they did over there, what they saw, but all of us welcoming them home, celebrating their survival, bolstering them any way we could. They did look fortified--if slightly askew (we poured doubles)--as they left with half a case, six varieties, gift of the other customers, who took up a collection (like those folks back in Indiana are doing, to buy Kevlar for their children).

So THAT, Mr. Bigshot General Christianson in your comfy administrative niche at the Pentagon, was a come-as-you-are party--prompted, unfortunately, by the not-party that very nearly got those darling, still-shaking boys killed. And I'm praying for lots more real parties like it--a whole world's worth, in fact--starting tomorrow night.