Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 22

A Prophet of HaShem Whose Name Was Oded

One character in my current novel-in-progress remarks at a point that God’s non-existence is a joke that proves He is a Jew, a sentiment that’s guided my own non-relationship with the Old Man since around the time the act curtain dropped on my bar mitzvah and we all retired to the Uniontown Country Club for bad chicken. I became a bar mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue—it was the slightly more stable of the two aging congregations in Uniontown—but I was really raised Reform. I am still moved by the High Holy Day liturgies, and I retain a great fondness for the Friday Night Shabbat service. But.

Somewhere along the way, someone smuggled in the Prayer for the State of Israel, a scandalous little piece of political agitprop that’s always made me cringe. Depending, I think, on the congregation and the prayer book, it either joined or supplanted the silly but less objectionable prayer for political leaders, a sort of broad wish-to-the-wind that our rulers comport themselves decently and conduct themselves with sage restraint—you can understand why a diasporic community would consider that a reasonable hedged bet, a proper blessing for the Czar, so to speak.

The Prayer for the State of Israel, on the other hand, has the Cold War stink of a kindergarten classroom being drummed to its feet to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Written in 1948, the year of the Nakba, it further affirms in the minds and hearts of so many American Jews an indelible link between spiritual Judaism and political Zionism. I always wonder that it doesn’t seem out of place in a Temple full of Americans, but then, I see some Miami Beach shonda babbling excuses for atrocity on the cable news programs, and I think, Oh. Oy.

American Jews have been bought off with Birthright beach vacations in Tel Aviv and campfire temple trips and a pack of lies about an empty desert waiting to be planted with those trees we bought in Sunday School with the leftovers of our Tzedakah money. The next time you see some terrible white man wondering where are the Muslim moderates who will condemn whatever dictator or terrorist or cartoon-villainously acronym’d insurgency the great minds behind CNN et al. are on about in a given week, ask yourself, where are the American Jews who will speak against the Israeli pogrom in Gaza? They are out there, of course, but too quiet, and too few.

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

Simulacra and Simian

Ape . . . not . . . kill . . . ape . . . unless . . . situational . . . ethical . . . concerns . . . dictate . . . a . . . temporary . . . revision . . . of . . . practical . . . application . . . of . . . apes’ . . . moral . . . code. I suppose it lacks the declarative grandeur of the more abbreviated thou-shalt-not, but it has the more singular advantage of being accurate. That Whatever of the Planet of the Apes finds itself praised as a great movie, a great scifi movie, or even just a pretty good summer action flick for what it’s worth is testimony mostly to just what a lot of lousy crap Hollywood puts out these days. At least the Marvel flicks are buoyed—most of them—by a degree of humor and insouciant pleasure at bringing a grab-bag of oddball superpowers to life; Planet of the Apes is dour, rain-soaked, and cod-epic: grim, overlong, humorless, and suffused with an utter weariness that comes to life only when it butts up against an even more boring stuffing of cliché.

What was it that Chekov said? If in the first act there’s a moral precept on the wall, then in the second or third act there’d better be a father vowing crazy revenge? I dunno. A global pandemic of MacGuffins has rendered humanity nearly extinct and apes, or at least, a cadre of apes, super smart. I am quite convinced that our childrens’ generations will regard our belief that laboratory viruses will perform such dubious miracles with the same amused contempt we reserve for the giant atomic insects of the 1950s. The apes have decamped from San Francisco to Muir Woods, and despite the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of apes and hundreds or thousands of surviving humans not twenty miles apart, they’ve gone ten years without noticing one another. Then they happen upon each other. Violence ensues. The Leninite apes overthrow the Trotskyite apes in a manufactured coup that image-checks the Reichstag fire. I shit you not. The whole thing would be a glorious hash if it managed a single joke over its geologic running time. The preceding are not jokes, by the way. They’re carried off with the gravity of a Bayreuth production of Parsifal.

Briefly—and I suppose these are spoilers, if you’re an idiot—the movie takes as its central principle that in acquiring human intelligence, so too have the apes acquired our human flaws. Their society is destined to recapitulate our own. Four legs good, two legs bad, but some animals are more . . . oh, fuck it. The apes, in living memory the captive medical test subjects of we vicious, baldy simians, don’t trust us and have an interest in self-preservation. There are good guys on both sides whose efforts to broker a peace are doomed to fail because of the plot of the movie. “If . . . no . . . inevitable . . . conflict . . . then . . . no . . . third-act . . . CGI . . . battle . . . scene,” the apes’ soon-to-be-deposed leader grunts at one moment. I thought it was a little weird that they included that line in the script, but hey, you know. What do the kids say these days? That’s so meta? Personally, I thought it was pretty ratchet.

By the way, the bad evil ape is a scarred victim of torture. Needless to say, he is an Insane Psycho Killer, as are all victims of torture, as well as all disfigured people. One of the glories of cinematic science fiction is that it permits us to recreate the phenotypological shorthand for moral character content that out-of-control political correctness ruined in art and literature, sometime between Dickens and the Civil Rights Movement, if my facts are correct. The noble appear noble, the evil are orcs, and you can’t trust a man in glasses.

The movie is supposed to be a new revolution in CGI, but in fact is back in Jurrasic Park territory, ape feet that don’t quite seem to touch the ground and fur that doesn’t quite move in the wind or rain. An early stampede of elk–these, too, are computer-generated–is especially appalling. The big orangutan’s face manages to fool you most of the time, but only because the architecture of an orangutan face is alien enough that the human eye has a hard time detecting its fakeness; the more human-standard chimps and gorillas look ridiculous. As hokey as the prostheses in prior runs around this particular fictive property now appear to us, this is worse. Small inconsistencies are often worse than big ones. An overabundant realism makes it impossible to suspend your disbelief.

Anyway, this movie is bad, but it’s so emblematic of a prototypical American cultural attitude toward conflict. “Poor Africa.” “The situation in the middle east.” “President Obama needs to be tougher on Putin.” It imagines war as fundamentally gestural, a signifier rather than a graveyard. Oh, if only two leaders could learn to trust each other, then the underlying questions of land and resources could all be banged out. Alas, evil monkey and Gary Oldman can’t get along. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, the apes launch a frontal infantry-and-cavalry assault on a fortified position, which would be crazy were it not for the fact that apparently the humans left the armory undefended? Boy, apparently the Simian Bird Flu also genocided common sense. As it hauls itself out of its climactic battle, the movie leaves one deep philosophical question unanswered. Could a chimpanzee really survive an uncontrolled vertical fall of greater than fifty feet onto a platform of steel rebar and remain effectively unharmed? Reader, the answer to that question is also the answer to the question of whether or not you should see this movie.

Bossa Nova

I’m only a casual soccer fan—hardly even a fan at all—but I do love hockey, a sport that’s in many regards soccer’s bruising inverse, a sort of deranged, wintry fraternal twin to the beautiful game. Hockey is America’s fourth big-league sport, and despite two consecutive Stanley Cups for Los Angeles and a general conviction among the cognoscenti that Western play is the superior style these days, it’s only in the icy, soggy band that stretches from Minnesota through the Great Lakes before curling up to Boston that the sport has anything like real prominence in the US. In bad football years in Pittsburgh, of which, lately, there’ve been more than a couple, the Penguins become the preeminent local team. But even here, any real appreciation and understanding of the sport is elusive, and Pittsburghers will sit over their big Yeunglings at the bar arguing with a straight face that Lemiuex was better than Gretzky before turning to the screen to shout, alternately, “Hit him!” and “Shoot the puck!” Almost invariably, neither would be a good idea. Hockey’s speed and bottled violence distract from the fundamental tactics of the game: position, possession, and puck movement; the critical importance of lines, line-changes, and specific match-ups. Besides which—there is the unaccountable power, especially in the playoffs, of the hot goalie. After a miraculous 2009 Stanley Cup run that kicked off with a mid-year coaching change, my Pens have fallen, again and again, in the pre-Cup playoffs, outclassed by lesser squads playing superior tactical hockey. The Penguins have two of the preeminent stars of the current game, which is fine during the looser, slower play of the regular season, but in the playoffs, stars matter less than systems. This is true in most team sports played at the highest professional levels. Hey, San Antonio.

Anyway, I mention this because Franklin Foer has a weird piece in The New Republic arguing something or other about the World Cup. This tournament, he frets, “lacked a historically great team”; the Germans only beat Brazil because of something to do with psychology; “Germany doesn’t have anything close to a transcendent player.” Well, let’s unpack that last bit:

Despite a roster filled with excellent players, Germany doesn’t have anything close to a transcendent player. (Neuer, at goalkeeper, is the only player who comes close.) And there’s nothing paradigm-shaking about the German style of play. The fourth German World Cup will likely be remembered much like the past three—the triumph of a great system and a team that doesn’t squander its chances.

That “despite” is doing yeoman’s work. The romance of movie-theater sport is the transcendent player; the reality of championships is blocky teamwork, especially in a game like soccer, where scoring chances are generally few. A cliché of American football may be appropriate here: “We’ve got to convert.” That is to say, the difference between winning and losing at the highest level of team sport is not squandering chances.

Yes, Messi was relatively quiet, but the championship game was really quite thrilling, and Germany’s single, winning goal in extra time was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Since I had no natural rooting interest in the tournament, I was hoping for Argentina to pull it out, based on no special affinity beyond a vaguely political preference for a national—if not sporting—underdog. Ah well. The game was a thrill because it could have gone either way. The pyrotechnics of scoring are dull; a sport in which most games are close games is a good sport. The Brazilian collapse was a wild outlier, but the Group Stage that Foer calls “affirmative, almost joyous”—meaning something by those words that no native speaker of English has ever meant before, I’m quite certain, as I haven’t the foggiest idea what they could possible mean in context—did not “[reflect] a buried side of human nature”; it reflected regular season play. Then the best teams moved on and things tightened up. The Germans were a great playoff team. Here’s another sports cliché: they didn’t make many mistakes. The ability to read a cultural moment into the style of a sporting victory is, I suppose, the sort of thing that gets you a job at The New Republic, but if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on about sports, then here, let me explain to you in great detail how American football is sublimated homoeroticism while you’re biting your nails over a critical field goal.

This ability to distill any fundamentally human activity into some dour reflection on “the geopolitical situation” strikes me as the saddest, most pathetic of psychic pathologies, a sort of illness of the soul that makes real joy and affirmation impossible to those who’ve been infected by it. It is, of course, also a prerequisite for writing for that certain kind of middlebrow American magazine that more and more resembles an outdated sanitarium full of mad—but not too mad—patients padding around the gardens believing themselves to be some combination of Clausewitz, de Tocqueville, Hans Castorp, and Jesus Christ. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes a cigar is Vladimir Putin’s surely immense . . .

“Vladimir Putin loomed at the center of the Maracanã today. And in a way, he’s loomed over this whole past month of soccer.” I can fairly guarantee you’re the only one who thought so, Franklin. Forgetting the months of protest in Brazil’s major cities, the forced evacuations of neighborhoods, the official violence, the waste and fraud of the whole affair, Foer pronounces the Brazilian games merely acceptably corrupt—a charming, minor, Latin-American corruption, unlike those dastardly Russians and evil Qataris. This is pure projection of the fixations of the American political class onto an unrelated event; the obsessions of the pundit class are the Vaseline rubbed on the lenses through which they view the world. The distinction between “the grotesque spectacles of preening authoritarian regimes” and the “moment of relative innocence” that was the Brazilian record of minor “misdeeds” is one largely without a difference. Authoritarianism is just a name for any country whose politics you don’t like at any given moment, not a descriptor of an actual political system. I am pretty convinced that Dilma Rousseff is somewhat less personally odious than Vladimir Putin, but she still sent in the riot cops. Meanwhile, I dare you to compare, for what it’s worth, their approval ratings in their respective countries. The world is more complicated than the never-correct and now-less-correct-than-ever teleology of West vs. East. There are real differences between conferences in the NHL; in “geopolitics” rather less so. Were the London Olympics really any less a “grotesque” and “preening” a “spectacle” than the Beijing Games; were either qualitatively different from Sochi? Maybe Western Europe and the US have just been more successful at pre-relocating their poor out of the attractive potential Olympic villages.

International sporting events are—of course—opportunities for the governments of host countries to transmogrify their failures into tawdry demonstrations of national purpose and unity. Hey, it beats invading Iraq, I guess. Is Russian state media sweeping Putin’s record on gay rights under the soccer pitch really more morally odious than the pages of the major organs of American media giving over their editorial and opinion pages to the endless stream of reactionary Neoconservatives and “National Greatness” Conservatives arguing that our own national renewal is just one more bombing sortie away, forever? Qatari slave labor is utterly hateful, but so is America’s internment of tens of thousands of child refugees in desert concentration camps. There is no precise taxonomy and rubric of national wrongdoing that allows us to rank these things like a deranged Wikipedia list: the world’s largest freshwater lakes by volume; the world’s most populous urban agglomerations; the world’s most evil national regimes. I would be perfectly pleased to have no more international sporting events ever, anywhere, but if we must, then the surest way to keep the grotesquerie to a civilized minimum is to always and ever insist that they are only games.

The 18th Brumaire of Samuel Alito, et al.

 As usual, the problem in the broadest possible view is the existence of men.
Since I haven’t got a quick fix for that, a few thoughts on the Hobby Lobby, the ACA, (the) God(s), and the Supreme Court, in no particular order.
Short of a divine program/pogrom to eliminate men via the rapid evolution of some kind of viable mammalian parthenogenesis (Are you there, God? It’s me, Jacob), the problem is less the historical animosity of the major religions to sexual freedom in general and women’s sexual freedom in particular—more about these below—than it is the specifically American weirdness of crafting a broad national policy in which the healthcare of most working-age adults and their children is provided by those adults’ employers through contracts with rent-taking private health “insurance” companies.
Of course, the US does have a public healthcare provision for the elderly and (some) of the (very) poor. Medicare and Medicaid broadly undercompensate hospital systems and providers, who in turn vastly inflate the billed costs of services, which are subsequently “negotiated” down by private “insurers”, who in turn mark back up their own costs to the companies and occasional individuals who contract with them. These so-called insurance companies are really more brokers than insurers. Hilariously, most companies actually hire 3rd-(4th?)-party brokers to negotiate rates with these very insurance companies. Along the way, any number of other con men, from vastly overpaid doctors to millionaire health system administrators to big pharma firms dip into this huge pool of sloshing money to extract their share of the racket. It is the stupidest system of public provision ever dreamed up in the mind of man; it makes the most corrupt developing-world griftopia look like a paradise of reasonable governance. At least when you bribe a policeman for a bogus traffic stop, you know exactly what it costs and what you’ve got out of it. Can you say the same for your latest hospital bill or “statement of benefits”?
No, duh.
The Hobby Lobby decision itself is a good bit narrower than the more dire reactions would have you believe, and it does appear that the ACA’s existing mechanism for allowing religious non-profits to opt out of certain coverages for moral reasons by effectively shifting the cost back to the government provides a reasonable mechanism for continuing to subsidize the contraceptive coverage for women whose private, for-profit employers opt out.
Naturally—this being America!—the deranged result here is another row of dominos in the Goldberg device: the federal government mandates a private business purchase a marked-up employee health coverage plan from a different private entity with the proviso that some of the mandated coverages are actually optional and the business may direct its insurer not to include such coverages, in which case the government will step back in to pay for them semi-directly. Does that sentence make sense? No, not really. Yes, exactly.
Obviously, this expensive, stupid system would best be replaced by a national, single-payer system, like all the other good ones in the world.
“We woulda, if it wasn’t for those evil ReTHUGlicans intent on opposing anything that President Obama wanted to do.” –Liberals
Yeah, who’s the superstitious religious nutsos who believe based on faith in the absence of evidence here? A historical note: the ACA passed with no support from the opposition party. The reason the Democrats did not pass single payer is that the Democrats did not pass single payer.
Returning to the Supreme Court for a moment: has ever any cryptomasonic gaggle of semi-intellectuals in the history of human society labored so conspicuously to cloak their inevitable arrival at their own obvious a priori conclusions in an evidentiary process? Again, you wanna talk religion? How about the belief that nine concurrent lifetime Popes operating under a principle of practical infallibility that makes the claims of the actual Vatican seem positively modest by comparison are going to utilize some marvelous hybrid of inductive and deductive reasoning to protect the holy principles of democracy, whatever those are. Of course this was going to be the outcome. Hey, I cheered too when Anthony Kennedy laid down the unassailable mandate (pun intended) that we gays can marry, but I ask you, is the system/institution that put that question beyond appeal a good one, now that the worm turned and the same old codger decided that, while gay marriage is good, ladies having too much sex is bad?
As for the Hobby Lobby, I’ve got an MBA and shit, and I cannot come up with a definition of a “closely held company.” Or, rather, I can come up with any number of definitions, all of them perfectly reasonable, which I could very easily apply to almost any company on earth, from the corner store to Exxon/Mobil.
Now, in general, I have more sympathy for religious peculiarity than your average American liberal; I am the sort of person who looks upon the word Balkanization with something less than total horror. I think that the conservative/orthodox religious opposition to contraception is wrong and incoherent, but I’m almost as skeptical of the use of the coercive power of the government to force them into moderating those views as I am of the notion that drone strikes in Pakistan will free women from the burqa. Are the Hobby Lobby owners hypocrites, investing in birth control on one hand while forbidding it on the other? Yes, they are human. But let’s take the Hobby Lobby owners at their incoherent but nevertheless sincere word: they believe God doesn’t want them to pay for their employees to use (certain) forms of female contraception.
Is this sexist, odious, and inequitable? Yes. But.
If the US had a functioning labor market that didn’t force so many people, especially women, to work for whatever checkout line would deign to hire them, this would all be much less critical. We could go on believing that corporations were voluntary associations rather than effectively feudal fiefdoms and that those who don’t agree with Ma and Pa Hobby Lobby could just vote with their feet.
Of course, we all know that that’s not the case. Labor is unfree. People are stuck in these shitty jobs. The Hobby Lobby is actually a good one in that it pays better wages than your average WalMart. A person’s access to healthcare should not be subordinate to the crackpot morality of their bosses. But here is the thing. It shouldn’t be subordinate to the perfectly rational desire of their bosses to save money on the health plan either. And here we are, back at single payer as the only equitable solution.
Just as a side note, the Court’s other opinion, Harris v. Quinn, regarding the mandatory payment of union dues, also made liberals mad. Hey, remember earlier this month when President Obama busted the Philly Transit strike? Yeah, I thought so.
The way to protect individuals from the whims of their employers is to provide everyone—everyone­—with a basic provision of food, shelter, clothing, medical care. Forget the “employer mandate.” Give everyone healthcare. Forget the minimum wage. Give everyone a guaranteed minimum income. Scarcity, by and large, is a scam.

The Responsibility to Protect

I am a poem, he says; he sets out to

destroy a country merely made of prose,

the words all justified in even rows,

inelegant and literally true,

doing merely what they’re meant to do,

dictionarily-defined. He blows

them up. Later, a guest on the cable shows,

he’ll note the syntaxless fragments scattered through

the once-ordered pages that he edited;

Incomprehensible, he’ll say, They are

incompatible with order and

responsible for their too-common dead

metaphors; but a redline here and there

is all they need: a pinch; a guiding hand.

De Rerum Natura

Reihan Salam and John McCain have scored

a six-pack and a fix of krokodil;

the war is over; both men need to feel

the war is never over. They are bored.

The decadent world they hate is drifting toward

. . . well, something. Sense-starved, they’ll steal

right up to death, which is all that’s really real:

irrevocable promise of its own reward.

Outside the window of the Georgetown study

where they melt in leather chairs among the shelves

of Boots and Kagans leans a homeless vet;

war muddied his boots; now his mind is muddy

with several sectarian civil-warring selves.

Someone calls the cops, reports this threat.

Goodbye Normal Genes

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first render in the unconditional declarative on Facebook:

Click. The same revelations reappear, hedged around by caveats like the lonely straight girl in a gay bar. Oh, our genes—notice the plural?—could make us gay . . . or straight. The flight from pure causality continues in the text, which departs even the territory of sexual difference for an and-everything-in-between taxonomy of non-classification. Evolutionary biology, ladies and gentlemen, where some (or all) of our characteristics and behaviors are determined (in part, possibly) by some (or all) of our genes (among other factiors).

By the end, we’re back in Kinsey scale territory:

It’s a bit like height, which is influenced by variants in thousands of genes, as well as the environment, and produces a “continuous distribution” of people of different heights. At the two extremes are the very tall and the very short.

In the same way, at each end of a continuous distribution of human mating preference, we would expect the “very male-loving” and the “very female-loving” in both sexes.

Gay men and lesbian women may simply be the two ends of the same distribution.

Ooooo, girl.

The desire to ratify scientifically our moral and social and economic postures and preferences is part of a generally cowardly morality that takes a look at some vile human prejudice and goes off searching for a pipette and a bell curve as a counter-scripture to whatever Bronze-Age prejudice a misunderstood God re-dredged up every time a louche Hellenism threatened to make Western civilization vaguely civilized. I’m glad that this fuzzy evidence is being wielded in favor of gay equality; I’m gay, after all. But I can’t help but see it as the boneheaded inverse of all the The New Republicans, Dark Enlightenment dweebs, and other direly self-afflicted determinist assholes forever trying to prove with the modern-day phrenology of intelligence testing that The Blacks Are Stupider. “We’re just asking the questions!” Yeah, yeah. Some of my best friends are black.

I’m sure genetic inheritance and gene expression do influence sexuality; likewise, intelligence and hair color and the desire to eat, or not to eat, cilantro; but the desperate reductivism that keeps popping up to declare that this or that immensely complex trait is the result of some butterfly-pinned nucleotide—and the attendant desire to draw some kind of socioeconomic conclusion therefrom—reeks of both the alchemical and the eugenic. God, remember the study about the genetic basis of American political affiliation? That’s what I’m talking about.

This is like when that weird-looking National Review gnome appeared a few days ago to declare that Laverne Cox is biologically not a woman and the Internet bravely rushed in to declare that scientifically she is. “He doesn’t understand the complexity . . .” And we were all treated to a series of semi-coherent expostulations on various human intersex conditions, as if that has anything to do with the social right of an autonomous human individual to decide whether she wants to live her life as a man or a woman or both or neither, less yet to determine against which physical expression of our species rather aesthetically unfortunate genital she wishes to press her own. If we make the concretized and inevitably temporary axioms of popular (I emphasize) science the preconditions of moral acceptability, then we are in big trouble, people. If Laverne Cox decides tomorrow that she wishes to be referred to by the pronoun Qfwfq  and that her gender is henceforth Parthogenetic Quintsexual Proteus Universal then it’s still no skin off my ass, whether ratified by double-blind or by dungeon-master.

Consider the study at hand. What it proposes, in fact, is that with the exception of a relatively small population on the long tails of the normal distribution, human sexuality exists along a fluctuating continuum, and even as one of those, ahem, long-tailed lovers myself, I can assure you all that some element of choice is involved in the expression of sexuality, gender, etc.—for me, to a lesser degree; for the Kinsey 4s out there, perhaps more. I went through periods of greater and lesser effeminacy (apologies for the word choice), especially earlier in my life; I’ve never been especially sexually interested in women, but I’ve certainly be attracted to them, sometimes, especially with close friends, with an intensity that shades into eroticism. Sexual morals should be built on the tripartite foundation of autonomy, self-determination, and consent, not on some fanciful on-off switch in the cells.

A Newspaper Columnist Takes Drugs and Inhabits the Consciousness of an Animal

Somewhere over Silver Plume, a hawk

stoops toward a rodent in the underbrush;

the mountains are green, the small streams rush

with new snowmelt; it’s hard not to be mawk-

ish—nature needs and hates our idle talk

about its beauty. Here in the hotel hush,

the window facing sunset’s westward blush,

I ward the door against housekeeping’s knock

and kneel into this newly legal prayer

to these foreign numina; they are displeased

and I, untethered, terrified, become

the mouse beneath the raptor-crowded air;

unlike a god, a bird can’t be appeased;

I squeak; it wheels; I freeze: immobile; dumb.

Thud. Ark. Enlightenment.

It was reported that the companies

that built, then ruined, GoogleMaps and made

iTunes a hash and ruined blogs have stayed

mostly white and mostly dude—but please

it’s not for lack of trying! What this shows

is that our self-styled meritocracies

are skeins of self-indulged affinities,

where merit is a mirror reflecting bros.

Last weekend on the Carolina shore

we swam in the ocean; one of us worried about

spiders (spiders?); what I didn’t say

was the pale crabs we watched darting out

along the water line were also spiders

in a way; we are all judged, at the end of the day

by distant gods to whom we’re all outsiders.

The Lafayette Baths

I heard it mispronounced as Charles Grief.

All right; that was me. I was nineteen

or so, an English major and a drama queen,

a boy-besotted druggie and a thief.

I wanted only what I wanted, chief

among those childish wishes to be seen

as an aristocratic aesthete-libertine—

casting that error in humorous relief.

Yesterday, one more court of appeals

struck down another law that said a man

can’t marry his special friend; time is a lathe

that carves as much as time’s a turning wheel

—everything is permitted that once was banned—

we are each the water in which we bathe.