A Pilgrim’s Digression

I get up at four-thirty in the morning. No matter how close the date may be to the summer solstice, the sun will never rise before me.

I see the dawn at five-thirty as I go out to wait for the bus, and I see it again at six-fifteen, when I exit the Metro.

If I work my usual day and do not go out to lunch, I do not see the sun again until I leave work at five-thirty.

Throughout the day, I routinely greet people with “Good Morning,” whether or not it is truly morning.

“Good morning,” I say, grinning stupidly as I greet a colleague. The time is five-thirty in the evening and I am leaving the building.
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A few weeks ago around noon on a Wednesday, you may remember, the Capitol and the White House were evacuated. I did not write about it at the time. For one thing, it seemed pretty insignificant after it was all over. We have evacuations all the time, on a monthly basis it seems, usually because of a “suspicious package.” We had a “suspicious package” evac just this past Monday. The only different thing about the evacuation on Wednesday a few weeks ago is that after we had sullenly walked down five flights of stairs and out of the building, a female Capitol Police officer came jogging up the street, shouting for us to move south as fast as we could below Pennsylvania Avenue SE.

I found myself walking calmly, not running, with a colleague, henceforth known as D. We walked down 3rd street SE as far as a church on the corner of 3rd and E. There we sat on the steps and looked back in the direction of the Capitol and watched and waited. D. told me about what it had been like on 9/11. He said they had heard the boom from the plane striking the Pentagon.
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As soon as the media types were allowed to view Revenge of the Sith, among the first things the public was told was that the movie was an implicit critique of Bush Administration policy. One article in the Washington Post was titled The Empire Strikes Bush, in which Lucas was quoted as giving some credence to the idea that his film was a critique of the Bush Administration and the Iraq war in particular.

After premiering his film at Cannes, Lucas was quoted as saying,

‘I didn’t think it was going to get quite this close,’ he said of the parallels between the Nixon era and the current Bush presidency, which has been sacrificing freedoms in the interests of national security. ‘It is just one of those re-occurring things. I hope this doesn’t come true in our country. Maybe the film will awaken people to the situation of how dangerous it is.’

Thus “Revenge” certainly has a political moral which Lucas believes is relevant to our society today. I would be interested in knowing if Limbaugh or one of his cohorts in radio has mentioned the links between Bush and “Revenge”; I don’t listen to these programs much anymore. I suspect Limbaugh hasn’t mentioned it much, if at all. I recall back in ‘99, when The Phantom Menace appeared, Limbaugh responded to the first negative reviews by commenting that the film must have a Conservative moral, if the “liberal” media was attacking it, and so he promoted the film on his program, at least until he saw it himself. I don’t think Limbaugh and his buddies have any illusions anymore about which side of the political divide Lucas stands on. What might be more interesting to study is how the politics of the prequels changed from 1999 through 2005, especially since the second and third film of the trilogy appeared after 9/11/01.
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[Spoilers Ahead!]

Friday night, my wife and I saw Revenge of the Sith for the first time. Despite having absolutely lousy seats in the far left hand corner of a small theater, I was nonetheless thoroughly impressed by this film. It pretty much wipes away every evil thought I’ve ever harbored about George Lucas. I admit I bought the novelization and the Dark Horse comic version of the story last month, so I knew the film was going to be good, but I didn’t know how good. It was so good, the day after seeing the film, I even bought some action figures at Wal-Mart (for my son, of course). On Sunday, I took him to Burger King and bought him a kid’s meal, which came with a small, plush Chewbacca. I have thoroughly succumbed to the effects of the marketing Force that is Star Wars. And I love it.

Before I get to my film review, let me say I remember the marketing around the original Star Wars in 1978. I saw that film when I was five years old, and my parents bought the toys, and the Burger King drinking glasses, and the lunch box, and the clothing, and the bed sheets, and I mailed away for the Boba Fett action figure, and I wore a cheap, vinyl and plastic C-3PO costume for Halloween one year, and a cheap, vinyl and plastic Darth Vader costume the next year. Anyone who thinks the marketing of Star Wars has been out of hand this year forgets what it was like in the period 1978-1983, when the original trilogy was the hottest thing in American pop culture. So I’m not going to nag Lucas about “selling out” anymore. I grumbled about that for awhile, but then I remembered how thoroughly my parents and I bought into the franchise the first time around, and I asked myself, who cares? Buying stuff is part of the fun. Let the man make another million. I’m enjoying myself.
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A few years ago, the American Library Association had a trademarked slogan called @ your library™. I bought some posters for my school library with various celebrities on them reading their favorite books. Read @ your library™!, the posters would say. The celebrities were always posed holding the book open at about chest height so you could see the cover of the book they had probably never read themselves: Nicholas Cage holding The Old man and the Sea, for instance.

Now not only can you read @ your library™!, but you can be fingerprinted, too, making it all the easier for the FBI to track you down when you commit the unconscionable act of using the library’s computer resources for suspicious activity. The Free Range Librarian points out an article on the ALA website, Naperville to Launch Fingerprint ID System for Internet Access, which states that one public library system in Naperville, Illinois, has indeed implemented a system for fingerprinting patrons as a way of tracking computer usage.

The reasons for a public library introducing biometric identification for computer access seems a bit muddled, to say the least. On the one hand, the library says it wants to prevent people from using a friend’s or relative’s library card number to log on to the library’s computers. Also stated is that using biometrics will allow a parental filter to be loaded at logon for children accessing the computer. Filtering in libraries is a whole other smelly kettle of fish, so I won’t go into that subject. School libraries, at least, lost that battle long ago.

However, if you read the article carefully, you discover that the idea of fingerprinting patrons first occurred to library staff when police subpoenaed patron records to prosecute a man charged with viewing pornography. It’s unclear whether the police used the Patriot Act to demand these records, but that would be a good question to know the answer to. Presumably the man the police were investigating was also masturbating, because as far as I know, it isn’t necessarily a violation of the law to simply look at pornography in a library, unless it’s child pornography. You might be asked to leave the library, but you won’t be arrested for looking at porn. You might not even be asked to leave. The issue of how to handle open Internet access is a persistant, prickly matter for librarians.

What the police investigation revealed is that patrons were using other people’s ID’s to log on to the library computers, thus inhibiting the police from prosecuting their man.

It’s unclear then how fingerprinting would prevent the viewing of pornography and/or masturbation in a library. Would the Reference Staff be equipped with portable fingerprint identification kits so they could lift a print from suspicious genitalia? Aha, you’ve been fondling yourself, Sir or Madam!

No, I don’t think so. Thus what we have here is a public library helping police “police” people’s on-line activity, simple as that. It might seem innocuous, especially since it is only one public library system, but in my opinion it violates just about every tenet of good librarianship, chiefly the right to privacy of library patrons. Librarians do not censor, they do not “police” anything or anyone. They certainly should not be in the business of helping the State police anyone. I admit I am no law and order type, however. I reserve all my mistrust for the State and its appendages. What’s your opinion about this?

I am going to see Revenge of the Sith tomorrow evening, so I have decided to wait until after I’ve seen it to write anything about Star Wars. I have been enjoying the reviews, especially the ones that interpret the film as an indictment of the Bush administration. The political interpretation may be a bit overanxious, however. I well know the impulse to latch on to anything culturally which salves the wounds of political loss.

In the meantime, I have been enjoying a series of articles by The Liberal New York Times on class in America. These articles have stirred a lot of questions in me. What is the middle class? Do people really “belong” to a class? That is, are we permanent occupants of a strata of society, no matter how much we achieve in life?

I have always been confused about class distinctions, which seem to me highly variable and dependent upon the place in which a person is born. Middle class in West Virginia and Kentucky means something very different from middle class in Washington, D.C.

In my favorite of the Times articles, Up from the holler: living in two worlds, at home in neither, the author insists on referring to the subject of the article as middle class. Della Mae Justice is a lawyer in Pikeville, Kentucky. Pikeville, incidentally, is near the border with both Virginia and West Virginia, and it was the site of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. In West Virginia, the main local news channel is WSAZ, the NBC affiliate out of Huntington, which also services parts of Eastern Kentucky. Growing up in West Virginia, one becomes as familiar with names and places like Pikeville (pronounced “pakvul”), Louisa, and Mount Sterling, as the towns and cities in one’s own state.
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The past few weeks, my wife and I have been watching the first season of the show Alias on DVD, at the same time that we have been watching shows from the current season on Wednesday nights (Alias is now in its fourth season, I believe). Alias is without a doubt the best show on television today. I know 24 has its boosters, but I am now an Alias fanatic all the way. I love this show.

It reminds me of how I felt when I began watching the X-Files in college. Finding the X-Files was a revelation. I never imagined something like that could survive on television. Discovering Alias has been like that. By the late nineties, however, I had grown cold towards the X-Files. Watching that show season after season, one felt that nothing was resolved, not even the tiniest bit. I quickly grew to hate that. I did not even watch the last two or three seasons of the X-Files. I have never even thought about renting it on DVD. Maybe one day I’ll feel differently, but I have developed a strong dislike for that show now, and I don’t see my opinion changing.
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The coffee of the day at Starbucks is Coupage del Sol, which Alta Vista’s babelfish helpfully translates from Italian to English as “coupage of sol.”

My babelfish is ill, I think.

My High School and College French suggests it means a “cutting of the sun,” or maybe a slice of sunshine. The placard at Starbucks says it is a blend of peaberries from Africa. Peaberries are the little green coffee beans that look like split peas. Tastes like coffee to me; I didn’t notice much of a difference, though supposedly this is a very select blend.

Recently, I finished reading A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am almost afraid to admit I did not find it terribly impressive. It’s clever and funny, but not particularly deep. I think it makes a better movie than a novel. I am not rushing right out to buy a copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I’ll wait until the sequel to the movie and then read it.

Instead, I recently picked up a copy of Günter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk.
I read The Tin Drum in my early college years, on one of my family fishing trips to Ontario. Grass is an interesting writer, and I was especially eager to read something recent by him.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=765093

Since the Newsweek Koran desecration story fell apart over the weekend, I’ve been wondering if the magazine might not have been set up by the Bush Administration as a way of discrediting another “liberal” media outlet. This is not too wild a conspiracy theory, compared to others I’ve cooked up in my crackpot brain.

Consider the chief similarity with the Dan Rather story: in both cases, the White House or its agents (in the case of the Koran story, the DOD) was given a chance to dispute a potentially damaging story before it went to press. The Administration remained mum.

Then, as soon as the story broke apart, the Administration had the pleasure of “[jumping] on the necks of the news organization with both feet” (to use Keith Olbermann’s words). Olbermann is the first reporter I know of to suggest that the Administration allowed Newsweek to impale itself on a story it could have disputed, but chose not to do so. His opinion is expressed on his blog here.

Last night on Brit Hume’s Fox News program, Mara Liason tried at least twice to point out that the White House had been provided an opportunity to tell Newsweek it had it all wrong. Hume responded condescendingly that it’s not the job of the White House to fact check news organizations.

So let me get this straight: a news organization is going to publish a story that makes the United States military look like a pack of Vandals, and which might cause serious unrest in the occupied lands of the Empire. However, it’s not the job of the Administration to offer evidence that runs counter to that story. Hmmm.
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I added three chapters to “Rented Space” last night. Chapters 9 thru 11 are now on-line. Ten and Eleven are relatively brief. Ten might end up cannibalized for other chapters, I don’t know yet. Here are the links to just those chapters for those who want only to read the most recent parts:

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter eleven presents Crabbe’s night thoughts in a fashion similar to what I did with Carolyn in chapter five. This raises a question about my characterizations. It’s fun writing these bits. Stream of consciousness writing is like picking at a loose thread on your sweater and pulling it until the whole thing unravels. However, I have only my own sweater to pick at, and I wonder if my portrayal of the inner thoughts of Carolyn and Crabbe are too similar, or if they seem like the subconscious workings of two distinct characters.

Carolyn and Crabbe have definitely grown to be the two main foci of the story, the pivots around which the plot turns. So I worry about how I portray Carolyn; I want her to be convincing. I worry that her night thoughts are too sex-obsessed for a woman. Well, I am sex obsessed, and as I said I only have my own mind to work with. I don’t know how “normal” I am, or if my “normal” is normal for a woman. Probably no. Probably definitely no.

Crabbe is a different story. I think his thoughts are mostly appropriate to him, but I wonder if some of Carolyn’s thoughts are appropriate to her. Especially the thing about the german shepherd. That’s something Crabbe would think of, it seems to me.

Not that women don’t think of sex frequently; I think they do. To what extent, I don’t know. However, the brain is a sexual organ, and I think when relaxed in those last ten minutes or so before sleep takes us and in the dreams that follow, most thoughts/fantasies/dreams can in some way be interpreted as sexual response. But that may be “psychological reductivism” as Crabbe calls it. I don’t know.

Anyway, I need some advice on that. Is Carolyn a convincing female character?

At some point, too, I am going to have to figure out a better organizational strategy. I had hoped the “new page” tag would allow me to keep adding chapters indefinitely, each one in sync with the online “page” numbers. But of course that didn’t work. After seven pages, I had to start a new blog entry for chapter eight. Now the “pages” are out of sync in chapters 8 though 11. Don’t know exactly what to do about that. What a mess.

In the meantime, while I work out the organizational details, here are links to previous chapters (in reverse chronological order) for those who want to catch up.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Seven

Chapter Six

Chapter Five

Chapter Four

Chapter Three

Chapter Two

Chapter One