Dyspeptic Myopic

my new book for 2012: UNDER THE NIHIL

2012-01-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

What if you could take a pill that removed all of your inhibitions, including your fear of death?

Would you become enlightened, or would you lose your mind?

UNDER THE NIHIL by Andy Nowicki, published by Counter-Currents, is now available....

To read a longer writeup/description of the book:
www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/under-the-nihil

To read an excerpt:
www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/into-the-nihil

To order via Amazon, in paperback, hardcover, or on Kindle:
www.amazon.com/under-nihil-andy-nowicki/dp/1935965239

The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories

2011-08-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that I've published a collection of shorter stories with Black Oak Media, Mike Kleen's fledgling company out of Illinois... THE DOCTOR AND THE HERETIC is my third published book.

For an excllent analysis and review of this collection, see www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/the-doctor-and-the-heretic-and-other-stories

To read an interview with yours truly, in which I pontificate mightily on the worth and value of this provocative set of stories, see www.blackoakmedia.org/main/2011/8/18/interview-with-andy-nowicki.html

Finally, to purchase THE DOCTOR AND THE HERETIC, see the range of options (including Nook and Kindle) here: http://blackoaktitles.wordpress.com/new-releases/the-doctor-and-the-heretic-and-other-stories

Youtube video promo for THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM

2011-04-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

Recently posted on Youtube-- check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_SClpoYr8I To purchase my new book, THE COLUMBINE PILGRM, go to www.amazon.com/columbine-pilgrim-andy-nowicki/dp/1935965123

THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM by Andy Nowicki: now available on Amazon!

2011-03-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

My newest novel, THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM, can now be purchased, either in hardcover or paperback, from Amazon or from the publisher, Counter-Currents Press. Amazon: www.amazon.com/columbine-pilgrim-andy-nowicki/dp/1935965123 Counter Currents: www.counter-currents.com/the-columbine-pilgrim To read James O'Meara's thoughtful, insightful, erudite, and highly entertaining review of this dark and hilarious novel of psychological horror, see www.counter-currents.com/2011/03/andy-nowickis-the-columbine-pilgrim And for information about my first novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE, see http://www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com/

THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM by Andy Nowicki

2011-02-26T21:06:00.001-08:00

... High school was Hell.

.....Payback is a Bitch.

.....Revenge has never been so sweet, or so bitter.

THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM, by Andy Nowicki, a grim and hilarious novel of psychological horror, now available for pre-order:

www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/the-columbine-pilgrim

and while you're at it, don't neglect to find out about Andy Nowicki's debut novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE:

www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com

Andy Nowicki Interviews Himself on his Incredible Rise to Literary Stardom, With all of its attendant perks and hassles

2010-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

(The following interview recently took place between the two warring sides of the author's split personality, with assuredly explosive results. To find out more about the author's work, go to http://www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com/ . To witness the author's awkward, eventually violent self-confrontation, and to learn about his upcoming literary projects, read on! To withdraw in disgust, click on the "X" in the top right-hand corner of your screen at any time. To fuck yourself, go fuck yourself. To die, take your pick of options available. To induce vomiting, go watch "The View.")

****Dramatis personae: Andy Nowicki the obsequious interviewer, and Andy Nowicki the sexy, intense, tragically misunderstood artistic genius*****

Setting: the author's seedy, smelly, cluttered low-rent apartment

AN: (walks in smiling, clad in white short-sleeve button-up shirt with "wacky" tie featuring cartoon characters chasing one another, then coupling in various obscene positions: a wardrobe signifying simultanous emotional fragility and an ever-present, never-dormant desire to be thought of as a cool, hip guy) Hello there, sir!

AN: (shirtless, sullen, silent, lights match, looks at it, throws it down, crosses arms, smirks, grunts, picks up and eats a week-old french fry lying on the table, grunts again, looks at wrist, realizes he's not wearing a watch, smirks again, thinks, "two freckles past a hair," frowns contemplatively, becomes pensive, contemplates death, punches own crotch, cringes, doubles over, goes cross-eyed, smirks at his own mortality.)

AN: So... I hear you're rapidly ascending the ladder of success these days.

AN: Oh, that's good. Butter me up.

AN: (eagerly) Okay! (takes out a stick of butter, reaches over to rub it on AN's bare chest. AN knocks it down, and fixes himself with a smoldering glare-- an onanistically homoerotic moment). Sorry. Well, let's get down to it. What's in the ol' hopper?

AN: You know, honestly this self-interview thing is pretty gay. Do we have to do it like this?

AN: Sorry! I'm just a little bit starstruck... I've been wanting to meet you for a while now. So, (looks at notes, squints eyes, adjusts glasses) talk to me about your latest projects. I hear you wrote a book!

AN: Yep, and I published it too, with Nine-Banded Books.

AN: Really! What's it called?

AN: Considering Suicide.

AN: Man. Sounds like a killer.

AN: Ha! Good one.

AN: Really? You liked it?

AN: Yes, you're a very witty guy.

AN: Aw, thanks... coming from you, that means a lot... So, your book can be found at any local bookstore, right?

AN: (sneeringly) Hell, no. The ideas it engages are way too radical, controversial, and gutsy. Barnes and Noble and Borders and Waldenbooks and whatnot are too pussy to handle such a hot beef injection of ballsy provocation. But you can purchase it on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/considering-suicide-andy-nowicki/dp/0615263321 ), or direct from the publisher (http://www.ninebandedbooks ).

AN: So, your book has been out for (squints at notes again) a year now, right?

AN: And selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Well, bitter-tasting hotcakes laced with exotic but faintly odd-smelling spices and made from a rotten batter in an unclean pot. Not to everyone's taste. And if you're old, you'll struggle with the very small print. But still a post-modern classic. Hilarious and horrifying. To find out more, see http://www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com/ . (Deja vu, no?)

AN: So, tell me about this new short story you're publishing. I hear it's a little racy, eh?

AN: It's called "The Poet's Wager," and it's set to appear in the December issue of Black Oak Presents (http://www.blackoakmedia.org/ ) . It's about a guy who---

AN: Let me guess.... a guy who's considering suicide!

AN: Yep.

AN: Killer!

AN: Only this time, he's got an attractive, rather sensual psychotherapist who tries to talk him out of it.

AN: Oooooh... Hot stuff. Does she succeed?

AN: You'll just have to read it and find out, big guy.

AN: Neato. We'll do that. If there's two things I love, it's suicidal patients and sexy shrinks.

AN: Not necessarily in that order, right?

AN: Right! Right! (snickers uncontrollably for several minutes in a manner that recalls Sheriff Roscoe's trademark giggle on "The Dukes of Hazzard") Ohhhhhhh. Gosh, you're funny. Oh, man! (rubs tear-stained eyes ruefully). So anyhoo, I hear you've also got an theological essay forthcoming?

AN: Yes, it's called "The Suffering God and the Culture of Death." It's set to appear in the next issue of Christendom Review (http://www.christendomreview.com/ ) due out in mid-November.

AN: And I'll just bet that it's about.... a guy who's considering suicide, right?

AN: Actually, no.

AN: WHAT?

AN: No, it's a piece I wrote about the problem of a good God and an evil world, and how well-- or conversely, how poorly-- this conundrum is resolved in the teachings of Christianity.

AN: Oh, wow. Sounds deep. (tentative pause) Uh, is it boring?

AN: No way! In fact, it's got a ton of sex, violence, and profanity. Haven't you ever read the Old Testament?

AN: (sheepishly) Well, just Leviticus. Oh, and a chapter or two of Micah. And Nephi.

AN: Nephi's in The Book of Mormon, you moron.

AN: Oh, yeah. Right. (makes note to himself, mutters) Nephi...in.. Book... of Moron... Well, before we conclude this scintillating conversation, let's look down the road. I understand you've written about (looks at notes again) Columbine High School... Just wanted to lighten things up a bit, huh?

AN: Well, we all need comic relief from time to time. Instead of writing about suicide, spiritual anguish and psychological pain, I thought I'd write about mass murder, suicide, spiritual anguish and psychological pain.

AN: Killer!

AN: I've got an alternative history short story that's set in a world in which the Columbine massacre never happened; you can read it free of charge at www.docstoc.com/docs/23306278/tears-of-the-damned . And right now, I'm looking to find a publisher for what I consider to be my opus--

AN: (writing this down) Oh...puss...

AN: --a novella called THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM.

AN: So, I'll bet it's about a guy who's considering suicide, right?

AN: I'm not going to talk about the premise of the story right now. I'm only going to say that it's the first thing I've ever written that actually freaked me out. It's not often an author gets to do that to himself. I read it over, and I thought, "That came out of me? Holy damn, I've got problems...

AN: All right! Anything else to say?

AN: Not really. Except maybe that I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with me that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you!-

AN: (looks) Ah hah!

AN: It appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapor... What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infintite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable.... In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, what is it to me: this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no nor woman neither...

AN: Woah. You're right. You do have problems. You know, I'm starting to change my mind about you. I used to think you were so cool and intellecual and darkly mysterious and funny and stuff. But now, I don't know-- you seem like kind of a drag and a bore...I think I'll just see my way out...

AN: Not so fast, bucko. (reaches into crotch of his pants, whips out gun)

AN: (puts hands up) Hold on, now... What do you want? I'll give you anything...

AN: I need spiritual peace and security. I need financial independence. I need greater faith. I need to recover my whimsical, youthful sense of optimism. I need a return to a child-like mindset of whimsy and wonder. I need greater success! I'm gonna be forty, damnit! Give me success!

AN: (hands still raised) Sorry, pal. I can't help you with any of that.

AN: Bummer. (pulls trigger-- a BANG sign shoots from the barrel of the gun. Both ANs fall from their chairs, convulsing, and soon their too too sullied flesh melts, thaws, and dissolves itself into a dew. Curtain.)

Considering Suicide: The Melancholic Reactionary's Bible

2010-09-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

Please see the following link for a superb writeup of my novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE, if I do say so my own damn self:

www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com

THE STREET HARDLY UNDERSTANDS: Groping for Transcendence In T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry

2010-08-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

(Andy Nowicki's novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE, is available at www.amazon.com/considering-suicide-andy-nowicki/dp/0615263321 , or from the publisher, http://www.ninebandedbooks.com/ . He regularly writes a column for The Last Ditch (www.thornwalker.com/ditch), and also contributes to Alternative Right, American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, and New Oxford Review.... The following essay will eventually become part of his upcoming juicy tell-all memoir: MEIN KAMPF, BOOK TWO: A NOBODY GOES NAVEL-GAZING). Don't miss the delicious autobiographical scandal also recorded in the next post down, entitled "Me And Vinny Murphy."

A literary enthusiast is often brought to the love of his life through a dubious, or at least unlikely, source. Later, the enthusiast in question may cringe when he considers the body of markedly inferior work, which as an immature thinker he used to love, a body of work which, though unremarkable in itself, somehow functioned as a portal through which he later emerged to discover a first-class poet, novelist, or thinker. Or, if he is less of a snob, he may simply reflect that providence often works in mysterious ways, and that all forms, the "high" and the "low," have their merits and their moments. So it is that, without cringing or blushing or displaying any other kind of elitist scorn for my former self, I reflect that without my adolescent's love of the mysterious lyrics of Simon LeBon, lead singer of Duran Duran, I never would have discovered one of the literary loves of my life.

LeBon's lyrics were often so abstruse and weird as to be incomprehensible ("Shake up the picture/ The lizard mixture, with the dance on the eventide"; "Don't wanna be in public, my head is full of chopstick"), but their defects did not matter to me as a starry-eyed, moody teenager back in the mid 1980s. To me back then, they were pure poetry. I appreciated how they so thoroughly avoided the "I love you baby" adolescent doggerel so frequently found in the lyrics to popular music. Looking back today, I recognize the limitations of Duran Duran as art-- though I still enjoy their early music: everything up through, say, 1985, when the band's lineup changed and the overall quality of their craft went into steep decline. But though my fondness for LeBon as a "poet" has sobered since my youthful days, I still have him to credit for introducing me to a far superior wordsmith, whose influence in turn-- and far more importantly-- eventually led me to Christianity. God works in wondrous ways, including through new wave synth-pop 80s bands whose keyboard players wear rouge and bright lipstick.

I still recall holding a newly purchased book of Duran Duran's lyrics in my hands. In that book, LeBon reflected for a moment on his influences. He talked about Shelly and Keats, as well as war poet Wilfred Owen. He also mentioned "the obscure imagery of T.S. Eliot." I liked that latter description; it sounded cool, so I went to the local library and checked it out. Immediately I was struck, as I still am, by the early work of Eliot, particularly the poems contained in the original collection from 1917 entitled PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Here is found the famous "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with its inviting, yet strangely ominous opening lines: "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table." I read on, was hooked, and still am.

Thank you Simon.

*********************

Today, viewed from the perspective of a middle-aged English teacher, whose hair, like Prufrock's, is growing thin, I still find myself most captivated by Eliot's earliest work. As for "The Four Quartets," written later in Eliot's life and long after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, they leave me cold. There is something about them that is too airy-fairy, too abstract. "The Waste Land," Eliot's most celebrated poem, has its moments of power, but I can't make head of tail out of much of it, and really, couldn't he have cut back on the abstruse literary allusions just a touch? (Those who call Eliot a pedant are no doubt mostly prejudiced against him for his political and social views, but honestly, the guy could lay on the references and footnotes a bit thick at times.)

In fact, while most things in my life have changed drastically since I first opened that book of T.S. Eliot's poetry as a 15-year old kid, one thing hasn't changed at all. My favorite Eliot poems are still the early ones, specifically the ones that comprise PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Today, most of Eliot's fans are those who share, or are at least in substantial sympathy with, his beliefs, which were officially enumerated in 1927: "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics." Eliot's enemies tend to dislike him for the same reason his fans tend to like him: they think he is too conservative and too religious. As a teenager and a young adult, however, I was an ardent leftist; it always distressed me a little that I couldn't reconcile my opinions with those of my favorite poet. Yet Eliot spoke to me in ways that no revolutionary-minded, left-leaning poet ever had. It would have been easier for me if I could have said that Shelly or Byron or Walt Whitman or Alan Ginsburg was my muse, but such was not the case; it wasn't the innumerable wild-eyed, crazy-living, bearded bohemian bards who caught my fancy, but rather the buttoned-up, respectable, sober-eyed, middle-class banker Eliot whose literary style I wanted to emulate. It was a bit uncomfortable that I was an ostensible left-winger who loved the work of an ultra-conservative writer, yet at the same time it never occurred to me to "ditch" Eliot; instead, I endured the cognitive dissonance that comes from holding two irreconcilable positions at once. Of course, something had to give eventually, and what "gave" (after several years of gamely enduring cognitive dissonance) was my leftism and my agnosticism. Through the influence of Eliot (and, I believe, God), I came to see the value of orthodoxy and tradition; I soon followed his path to Anglo-Catholicism, before going one step further and dropping the "Anglo" prefix entirely two years ago.

It's often been intimated to me that, now that I'm a good believer in sacramental Christianity (though now of the "Roman" rather than the "Anglo" stripe), I ought to gravitate towards Eliot's later work, written when he was a good (Anglo) Catholic. Yet for some reason, it's Eliot's early work that still holds the most appeal. This is particularly true with PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS, a collection of poems in which the speakers grope desperately for a sense of transcendence, for a connection with the divine in the midst of a world that they feel to be utterly drained of spiritual vitality. But why should this appeal to me more than the more "settled" and calm quality of Eliot's later works, like "Ash Wednesday" or "Little Gidding"? Perhaps because I'm still a moody teenager at heart, still restless in some ways, still searching.

*******************************************

PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS contains what could be called four "major" poems: the famous "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and the lesser-known "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Shorter poems are interspersed between these larger ones, including the wry "Cousin Nancy," about a sophisticated woman who "smoked and danced all the modern dances," and whose aunts "weren't sure what to think of it," as well as the satirical "Boston Evening Transcript," whose readers are said to "sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn." Here, I wish to consider mainly the four longer poems of the collection, and their collective meaning and effect.

It's quite fascinating that a man in his early twenties would feel compelled to write "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It is, after all, about the travails of a middle-aged man, one who fears that life has passed him by and dreads the approach of old age and death ("I grow old... I grow old... I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker/ And in short, I was afraid.") It is, of course, always inadvisable to try to read a writer's work autobiographically, but I've always wondered to what extent Eliot could identify with Prufrock, even though by all accounts he wrote the poem as a newly-minted college graduate. (A few years later, the still young Eliot would follow with "Gerontion," about a decrepit old man reflecting upon the emptiness of his soon-to-end life.)

Prufrock's dramatic monologue sets the tone for the entire collection; as with every other major poem in PAOO, it is told from a first person point of view; as with the other poems, the speaker often lapses into curious, impressionistic, and rather gloomy descriptions of urban scenes-- here, we have the extended description of "yellow fog," which one suspects to be pollution; the fog is compared to a cat, and is said to "rub its back upon the window panes," "lick its tongue into the corners of the evening," and "curl about the house." We also hear that the speaker "has seen the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows." These descriptions help to reinforce a context of the speaker's feeling of anonymity in the midst of a harsh, smoggy, and unforgiving city filled with isolated, lonely men (who mirror Prufrock's own sense of isolation) and unobtainable, high-class women who "come and go, talking of Michaelangelo." The speaker is hesitant to approach these latter, much as he desires company, for fear that they will turn him down cold.

Prufrock fantasizes about fearlessly expressing himself in a very forthright manner, showing himself to be a powerful man, living an extraordinary life, but he isn't sure it's worth the risk, so he refrains:

Would it have been worthwhile, to have bitten off the matter with a smile

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question

To say, 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all...

If one setting a pillow and throwing back a shawl, and turning toward the window should say,

'That is not what I meant at all

That is not it, at all."

What Prufrock fears is the awful feeling of putting oneself on the line, making oneself vulnerable, only to have one's interlocutor reject what he has expressed as irrelevant or tiresome. Yet Prufrock's angst transcends the problem of being shy around the opposite sex. Ultimately, what he wants is a sense of connection, not merely on a romantic level, but in a more profound sense. "Prufrock" is not an explicitly religious poem, but its speaker clearly suffers from spiritual thirst-- he wants more than can be provided by the dry, sterile desert of a modern world he inhabits, where faith seems to have altogether evaporated. It is not by chance that Prufrock invokes figures like John the Baptist and Lazarus, comparing himself unfavorably to these great men who played such an important role in the origins of the Christian faith. Prufrock feels that he has suffered just as they have, but his suffering seems meaningless, because it hasn't been redeemed by the ability to believe in a transcendent realm, in a God who, in the words of the author of Revelation, "wipes every tear from our eyes." Prufrock has "wept and fasted, wept and prayed," and has even, like John the Baptist, "seen (his) head.... brought in upon a platter," but Prufrock, unlike the Baptist, cannot take the real step into martyrdom and faith, so he remains insignificant: "I am no Prophet,” he mourns, “and here's no great matter."

Near the end of the poem, Prufrock walks along a beach and looks out to the eternally rolling waves of the ocean; this provokes a vision of a rather sensual spiritual realm, inhabited by "sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown," who "ride seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back." The mermaids sing to one another, he observes, before adding poignantly, "I do not think that they will sing to me."

In the last three lines, the first person "I" becomes the collective "we," signifying that Prufrock is not meant to be viewed as an isolated case, but rather as a microcosm of the universal state of modern man. Like Prufrock, we all "have lingered in the chambers of the sea," in a state of ecstasy (rendered in suggestively erotic terms through the imagery of the beautiful mermaids) that is, however, only a fantasy state; in reality, we have no faith, so we can only drown when we wake, and after dying, we cannot be raised, as Lazarus was, from the dead.

In the hyperallusive "Waste Land," a common motif is the depiction of impotence, joyless sexuality or lack of fertility as representative of spiritual emptiness. In "Prufrock," this same theme is rendered in reverse: the speaker's dreams and fantasies involve romantic and sexual success, but these dreams are in fact representative of Prufrock's unfulfilled spiritual urge for a connection to the divine. In both cases, Eliot uses sexuality as a metaphor for spirituality; Prufrock as well as the debauched characters in "The Waste Land" yearn for a meaningful union with God, but cannot access the faith that came more easily to their pre-modern forbearers, so they cannot succeed even at having a fulfilling physical union with their fellow human beings.

In "Portrait of a Lady," the second of the major poems in OBSERVATIONS, we again have a story in which a character seeks love and ends up unfulfilled; this time, however, the speaker, rather than being the one who fears rejection, is the one who does the rejecting.

The "lady" in question appears to be a well-bred, well-educated older woman approaching the age of spinsterhood; the speaker is a younger man who visits the lady occasionally for tea out of a sense of politeness, but secretly feels derision for her. As the lady goes on about the sublime nature of Chopin's music, the travails of middle-aged life and other subjects in a somewhat grandiloquent and pretentious manner, the speaker is bored, restless, and a little frightened. He observes that the Lady's tea room has "an atmosphere of Juliet's tomb," and that her voice resembles "the insistent out of tune/ Of a broken violin on an August afternoon." The speaker is aware that the Lady has designs on him; she is rather forward in her ladylike way, praising highly his sensitivity and kindness ("I am always sure you understand/ My feelings, always sure that you feel,/ Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand."), which is especially ironic, given the cruelty of the speaker's inner monologue regarding her. Later, the poem subtly indicts the speaker, who may well be a largely autobiographical figure, when the lady tells him that "youth is cruel, and has no remorse/ And smiles at situations which it cannot see" and the speaker responds by smiling, confirming the truth of her declaration.

The sport that the speaker has at the Lady's expense comes back to haunt him near the end of the poem, when nearly a year after his first meeting with her, the speaker returns to tell the lady that he is going abroad for an extended period of time. Shortly afterwards, the lady expresses her regret that they had not grown closer over the time that they had corresponded:

“I have wondered frequently of late...

Why we have not developed into friends…

For everybody said so, all our friends,

They all were sure our feelings would relate

So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

One has the impression that the speaker's conscience is pricked by this confession, but he does not repent for his callousness, nor does he pity her. Instead, he rather brutally imagines that if she were to die one day soon and leave him "sitting, pen in hand... Not knowing what to feel or if I understand," that this would mean that she would "have the advantage." The speaker is most upset, not by his own lack of gallantry, but by the notion of in some manner being one-upped. Once more, as with "Prufrock," there is a lack of connection, a failure to communicate, and the result is unfulfilled desire and resultant sterility; one imagines that the speaker was the lady's last chance at finding a mate; now she will grow old and die without having children.

The two final major poems in OBSERVATIONS are more impressionistic, telling less of a story than evoking a mood. "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" has a phantasmagorical element; one could almost call it "psychedelic," featuring as it does talking street lamps and other strange sights and sounds. Here, the speaker is walking the streets of a city at night, in a trance-like state. At midnight he hears street-lamps beating "like a fatalistic drum.” Later, starting at half-past one, a particular lamp begins talking to him, pointing out various sordid sights, including a likely prostitute whose dress is "torn and stained with sand" and the corner of whose eye "twists like a paper rose."

At half-past two, the same lamp shows the speaker how a stray cat in the gutter has "slipped out its tongue/And devour(ed) a morsel of rancid butter." At half-past three, the lamp draws the speaker's attention to the moon, which the lamp characterizes as an elderly woman who has lost her memory and sits alone in the sky in a pathetic, geriatric stupor.

Each time the lamp speaks, its words cause the speaker to remember various things he has seen: first, inanimate objects which seem to have some somber significance, including "a twisted branch upon the beach/ Eaten smooth, and polished/ As if the world gave up/ The secret of its skeleton,/ Stiff and white," then a child stealing a toy with an impassive look on his face and a crab (recalling the famous "pair of ragged claws" from "Prufrock") clinging to the end of a stick. Humanity, in the person of the boy, is here depicted as animal-like, tenacious and remorseless, dwelling in filth, doing what is necessary to survive but having no apparent soul. The lamp's reference to the moon, curiously, brings to mind the heartless, dirty goings-on of the corrupt city, savoring of prostitution, drunkenness, and other vices: "female smells in shuttered rooms/ And cigarettes in corridors/ and cocktail smells in bars."

At four o clock, the speaker's phantasmagorical experience has come to an end; he is instructed by the street lamp to go to his apartment, open the door with his key, brush his teeth, go to bed, "sleep, prepare for life." Yet the reader gets no sense that anything has been gained from this unique night of visions and memories. Indeed, the lamp's final words are perceived by the speaker as being "the last twist of the knife." The speaker aches, in some inchoate way, for a sense of goodness and transcendence, but all he has been shown by the street lamp reeks of filth, corruption, and (in the "person" of the moon) pitiful decrepitude.

If the mood of "Rhapsody" is ultimately despairing, "Preludes" is more wistful; there is a glint of hope here, or possibly merely an expressed hope for hope. This poem is divided in four sections, the first two of which are impressionistic street scenes. The first section describes a city at dusk, with an unnamed person observed by the speaker as surrounded by "grimy scraps of withered leaves" and tossed-away "newspapers from vacant lots." It is, we are told, one of those "burnt out ends of smoky days." Again, there is pollution, and an understated sense of dreariness about an urban landscape.

The second section of the poem is set in the same place at morning-time, describing the urban population's mad stampede to work, what in later decades would be called a rush hour. There are "faint stale smells of beer," no doubt from excesses of the previous night, and "muddy feet" that "press to early coffee stands." At this point, the speaker's thoughts turn to "all the hands/ That are raising dingy shades/ In a thousand furnished rooms."

As in "Rhapsody," the sights and sounds the speaker sees and hears help to trigger his memory, and in the third section of the poem he returns to the "you" referred to briefly in the first section. The "you," we find, is someone who lay in bed (behind one of those thousand "dingy shades," no doubt) the previous night, probably a woman and likely one of dubious morals, who witnessed in a revelation "the thousand sordid images of which (her) soul was constituted." Having gained this unflattering self-knowledge, she is then afforded another vision when morning comes, one only described as "such a vision of the street/ As the street hardly understands."

The street, after all, as the speaker reveals in section four, only knows the everyday occurrences; it has no transcendent knowledge, such has been given the woman. The street only knows sounds like those made by "insistent feet/ At four and five and six o'clock," and the sight of "short square fingers stuffing pipes," and "eyes/ Assured of certain certainties." The speaker, however, inexplicably finds in these moments an exquisitely sad indication of "some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing."

With these lines, it would seem that the speaker and the object of his attention share a moment of knowledge, a connection. This notion, however, is nullified by the final three lines of the poem, in which the woman, apparently having awakened from her trance of the previous night, roughly and crudely rejects the speaker's sensitive insight:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

This is another "That is not what I meant, at all" moment, in which an attempt at communication is harshly dismissed. Here, however, one gets the impression that the emphasis is less upon the rejection, and more upon the transcendent truth that is still no less true for having been rejected. What truly lingers in the mind of the reader of the "Preludes" are the lines about having "such a vision of the street" and getting a notion of "some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing."

The latter is the first hint of a Christian sensibility on Eliot's part, a striking characterization that could be applied to Christ but also to Mary-- indeed, it represents a highly Catholic understanding of Christianity, one centered around the Passion, where suffering is in some manner redemptive, where one can claim the divine to be "infinitely gentle" and "infinitely suffering" without fear of being charged with blasphemy, since God himself in human form was scourged, mocked, and nailed to a cross, and did not retaliate against his attackers, but rather prayed for them.

Of course, this portion of the poem is only a hint, a clue that a reality exists beyond the mundane and sordid goings-on of the city. After all, the street itself "hardly understands" such profundities, and the same can be said for many of the street's dwellers, who are too focused on worldly concerns--sex, money, the daily routine-- to pay attention to such "fancies." For the speaker, however, these "fancies" are the one thing needful, pointing as they do to an answer to the "overwhelming question" referenced earlier by J. Alfred Prufrock, an answer, one gathers that the both the speaker in "Preludes" and Prurock desperately seek, because it represents a leap from the impermanent, with all of its wretched and meaningless "masquerades that time resumes," to the transcendent, represented here by a perpetually suffering, yet eternally loving, divine presence.

It is precisely this vague dissatisfaction with the state of things, this yearning for transcendence, that motivates the restless search undertaken by the diverse cast of characters assembled in PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Eliot, in a later stage of life, may have felt that he had outgrown this phase; he is reported in his old age to have dismissed "The Waste Land" as part of a youthful "grouse against life." Chances are that he might have felt similarly about many of his pre-"Waste Land" poems, which are similarly bleak in tone. But what Eliot captured so well in these early poems were the very aspects of the godless life which cause a person to seek God in the first place-- the sense of emptiness, of despair, the sickening fear of impending death and decay.

If one is to be truly converted to belief in a transcendent realm, one must first be convinced that the world is a thing of naught. Thus there can be a thin line between black, suicidal depression and enlightenment, but often, perhaps always, one cannot access the latter without first enduring the former. This, in turn, is why I find it hard to conceive of Eliot's early poetry, with its emphasis on despair, as being distinct in theme from that of his later work, with its emphasis on faith. To me, it has always seemed like comparing two different points in the trajectory of the life of a Christian convert, two different sections of the same story. Poetry, like all forms of literature, must be true to every facet of life, including life's less savory or pleasant moments. In a very real sense, we are all still searching as long as we are alive; doubt and struggle cannot be wholly expunged from our souls until we are perfected in Heaven. Prufrock and the rest of the characters chronicled in OBSERVATIONS, then, speak to some part of us all, if we are honest enough with ourselves to admit it.

Me and Vinny Murphy

2010-02-25T14:15:00.000-08:00

(The following essay is an exclusive exerpt from Andy Nowicki's upcoming juicy tell-all memoir, MEIN KAMPF, BOOK TWO: A NOBODY GOES NAVEL-GAZING, which should be completed sometime before his death. Nowicki is a startling, if now relatively unknown talent in the literary world. He composes regular columns for the thought-criminalistic site THE LAST DITCH (www.thornwalker.com/ditch) and has published the novel CONSIDERING SUICIDE with Nine-Banded Books (which can be purchased at http://ninebandedbooks.com/?p=50 or www.amazon.com/considering-suicide-andy-nowicki/dp/0615263321 )

VINNY MURPHY AND ME: REFLECTIONS ON SOME COLLEGE DRAMA

How do we begin to understand the very existence of the arts? Theater, music, dance, drawing, and literature (be it written or oral) have been around seemingly as long as man has walked the earth. The ubiquity of these institutions can, I think, be chalked up to the fact that man has always needed a kind of mirror to look at himself, to study his own condition, to examine the full extent of the perplexing, if not horrifying, predicament of being.

Given this truth, it is astonishing just how seldom one truly sees himself in any profound sense in a book, play, movie, painting, or sculpture. Alienation and indifference are much more common responses than identification, recognition, and engagement for the typical art-purveyor; he emerges from the experience thinking not "wow!" but "eh." He might not admit to his lack of enthusiasm, particularly if the art in question is widely thought of as great by those considered "in the know" about such matters; if such a one cares about his reputation, he will outwardly accede to this consensus, proclaiming his solidarity with the best and the brightest's shared adulation of a particular work, even if inwardly he must admit that it leaves him cold and uninspired.

Sometimes this honest reaction is the result of mere ignorance on his part; philistinism today, as ever, reigns supreme among much of the population who simply don't have any worthwhile aesthetic sense to speak of, and who will never care about gay, girly crap like "art appreciation" anyway. But at least as often, the problem is that the consensus among "right-thinking" critics and intellectuals is simply wrong. Intellectuals, after all, can be swindled and bamboozled just like everyone else-- they are particularly vulnerable to the "flattering unction" that accompanies the sense of feeling oneself to be among the cultural elite. If they hear their friends lavishly praise a particular "art" film, let us say, then they will not want to seem like they are one of those ignoramuses with no sense of aesthetics; they will then declare loudly and forcefully that they agree with their friends, unaware that these friends, in their heart of hearts, probably dislike the movie in question as much as they do, that their friends are just as caught up in the fraud, provoked by a desire to conform to the dictates of the "smart set," a group which, ironically enough, prides itself on not being mere slaves to public opinion.

Personally, I find that the intellectuals and the philistines both leave much to be desired; I have never especially cared for the company of either camp. At the same time, I have long looked to the arts for a sense of being and belonging with my fellow man, in no small part because of my exile (in part self-imposed) from the mass of humanity. Movies have a particular appeal to me, in that they provide a temporary relief from the the day to day ordeal of living inside my head, a unique affliction of the lonely exile who finds people trying yet craves human interaction, the simultaneous misanthrope and romantic, who is perenially disappointed with humanity (including himself), yet indefatigably hopeful about forging meaningful connections with the miniscule number of like-minded souls he cannot stop himself from believing are truly out there somewhere.

As an English teacher and literature afficiando, of course, I swear by the written word, but I must admit that no book has the same immediate power of a movie: the power, that is, really to take you on an intensely visceral journey that truly rockets you out of yourself, makes you forget your life for a short amount of time. While reading a book, no matter how fascinated you are with the material, you are never really wrestled out of your skin; you are ever aware that you sit in your comfortable chair, turning the pages. When at a movie, however, you can actually forget both where and who you are for a time. This isn't to say that movie-watching is superior to book-reading --God forbid!-- only that it is, by nature, a more intimate and hypnotic experience. Words signify things, but images are those things; a movie gives you a short cut to an artificial reality that seems quite actual, while a book only suggests such a place; it is up to the reader to use his own ingenuity and imagination to create its look and feel in his mind's eye.

Put another way, reading is harder work. Movie-viewing is in its very essence a more passive experience. It is only when one is totally passive that one can be most thrillingly ravaged, of course, which is why great movies make for such an immediate and enthralling experience, like a wild roller coaster ride or really good sex.

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I see a lot of movies, occasionally accompanied by others but mostly by myself, and most of the time I leave the theater disappointed. I go seeking a lot of things: an interesting story, pithy and witty dialogue, compelling acting and direction, cool visual effects. Sometimes I am impressed in certain ways, and let down in others. I acknowledge where it is good, and lament what it lacks, make a note in my movie log, and move on to the next feature.

But.. I also go to the movies for the same reason I read books-- to seek myself in others, to know that I'm not truly alone in this world, that people out there know the things I know, endure the things I endure, share the same hopes, fears, dreams and passions as me. It is a tall order, I know. Going in with such lofty expectations, with the bar set so high, one cannot help but frequently be crushed with disappointment bordering on despair. So it is. Yet I find that I cannot alter or modify my ideals any more than I could stop breathing. And in the rare cases where my ideals are actually met, it is a joyous and exhilerating occasion.

In the waning months of the 1990s, I saw "Fight Club" and felt shaken to my core; here was a film that, in many crucial ways, spoke to me. I saw myself, not so much in the actual details of the plot, but in the themes it relentlessly pounded home: alienation, discontent, the desire for a more authentic, fulfilled, meaningful life, the pleasures and pitfalls of surrendering to your dark side. It was a rare moment of feeling not-alone, of knowing a connection... seeing it made me feel like more of a person and less of a phantom. Ten years later, in the waning days of the "naughty oughts," in the midst of that dead week between Christmas and New Year's Day, I went to see a movie likely to keep a much lower profile in our popular culture: Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles." Once again, I was rocked, rolled, shaken, and stirred. Only this time, I didn't just feel a thematic affinity; this time, my own memory was roused. I recalled certain events in my life during the waning months of the 80s, twenty years prior. Specifically, I remembered my own youthful experience with a talented and difficult theater director, an experience which in certain ways uncannily mirrored the storyline of the film.

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The hero of "Me and Orson Welles" is Richard Samuels (Zac Effron), a teenage boy who dreams of making it big in the theater world. He doesn't exactly know what he wants to do (act? write? direct?), but he knows he "wants to be a part of it." Richard, we see very early, has a talent for scamming his way into an operation. Handsome, witty, charming, and well aware of being these things, he radiates a confidence that impresses up-and-coming director Orson Welles, with whom he is brought together one day by fate, chance, or luck. Welles immediately casts Richard in a small role in his ambitious Broadway production of "Julius Caesar," which has been in rehearsal for ages and is running dangerously overbudget.

Once he joins this theater troupe, this daydream-addled kid from the suburbs finds himself in way over his head. Movie critics have largely focused on Christian McKay's virtuoso rendering of Welles, but it is Effron's performance that forms the true emotional core of the movie. Effron is asked both to show the confidence and swagger of one wise beyond his years, and the angst and vulnerability of youth. It's a difficult tightrope to walk, but Effron pulls it off beautifully; the viewer at first admires his gumption, envies his luck, then grows to sympathize and even ache for him as the film races towards its exciting and bittersweet conclusion.

The pivot point of the conflict in the film is the complicated relationship between Richard and Orson. We see the latter primarily through the eyes of the former; he is at once a mentor and an antagonist, a source of admiration and reverence, as well as an object of fear and loathing. As played by McKay, Welles is many things: a brilliant, artistic innovator; a charismatic leader and manipulator; a blustering, temperamental, and irresponsible clown; and a ruthless, egotistical monster. Richard is at first entranced by the ballsy exploits of the larger-than-life director, who dares to improvise dialogue in the middle of a scripted radio play, and who had the effrontery to omit the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from a prior staging of "Hamlet," because he found it irrelevant to the plot. But the boy in time comes to see the black heart of this would-be father-figure; he grows to fear the older man's tyrannical orientation, and eventually comes to despise his total absence of moral scruples. Soon he faces a stark choice: should he countenance the legendary director's behavior in order to further his budding career, or ought he stand up to this sleazy, bullying asshole?

It's a question that many of us have faced at one time or another in our lives. Do we "go along to get along," and tolerate ill-treatment from those with power over us? Or do we confront our oppressors and tell them off, perhaps in so doing putting our careers and livelihoods in danger? It's a shame that this theme is such a perennial one in history; one wishes that power weren't so seductive, that there didn't exist so many authority figures who got off on it, and who so treasured their ability to lord it over their inferiors. But such is life, I suppose, and such is human nature. It would also be neat if pain, despair, and death weren't real, but for whatever reason that isn't the case either. That bullies exist-- and moreover often thrive-- in this world may be something additonal to hold against the world as it is constituted, but anger with the world does nothing to ameliorate the sufferings it afflicts upon us. Life doen't conform to our notion of justice; evil often wins, and good often loses. And a flawed but generally decent person, like Richard, often finds himself ruled by a hateful and despicable jerk like Orson Welles.

"Me and Orson Welles," it so happens, yanked my memory forcibly back to a time when I was close to Richard's age, and found myself in a very similar situation. Of course, in many ways I did not resemble Zac Effron's character; I didn't have half of his charm, and I wasn't a tenth as cute.

I was, however, young, cocky, insecure, and naive. If it sounds contradictory to describe myself as both "cocky" and "insecure" at the same time, remember again the enigma of youth. A young man can be sure of himself in a way no older man could (unless he were the sort who never grew up), yet his ego, swelled as it may seem, is filled mostly with hot air; like an overinflated balloon, it will burst with the merest prick from the tiniest of pins. As it happens, I was about to run into a rather large prick. His name was Vincent Murphy, and in 1989 he had just become the artistic director of the theater department of the college I was attending as a freshman. More on him in a moment.

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Now that I am nearly 40 years old, how do I begin to comprehend myself at age 18? How does one process the tumult and roiling confusion of that era of his life? The gulf separating the 18 year old boy and the same boy five years prior is unfathomably great. I am now, at the age of 39, pretty much the same man that I was five years ago at age 34, eventful as the last five years have been for me. But between ages 13 and 18 were events that seemed almost catacylsmic in scope, miniscule though they were from anyone's point of view besides my own. I will treat of the specifics of this era in my personal history elsewhere in this account; for now, allow me to introduce myself-- my younger self, that is-- to you.

But prior to any introduction must come a disclaimer of sorts. I have always had a difficult time seeing myself, as it were, due I think in part to having been the sole member of my mother's brood, an "only child," as we have grown accustomed to calling such people. Most children, growing up, are able to obtain some type of understanding of their identities-- however true or false, and for good or for ill-- from their siblings. It is from his brothers and/or sisters that the typical boy is enabled to form an impression of himself, because at some point in his boyhood a boy's peers become the ones to whom he looks for assistance in self-knowledge. His parents, he comes to realize, are hopelessly biased and out of touch; of course they think he's the greatest kid on earth, but his peers, so he thinks, can give him a more realistic picture. (In reality, of course, his peers are just as deceived as his parents, just in a different way and for different reasons.)

For the only child, it is much harder to obtain this peer-driven insight. If he is naturally gregarious, the only child might be able to make a lot of friends, and draw out from them how he ought to see himself, but even in such a case the friends he makes aren't his brothers or sisters; they don't stand in the same relation to his own parents as he does. In any event, since I have always been temperamentally reserved, I was never able, nor especially inclined, to find any substitute brothers or sisters, even though a part of me truly wished to do so. The sure sense of being alone came early and often. It wasn't always an unpleasant feeling-- sometimes it felt quite satisfying, in fact, but it was a fact, just the same: I stood apart; I was on my own. Often I rather liked being alone and apart, and at other times I badly wanted to be "with" others, but regardless of what I wanted, facts were facts. I was different, and I soon found that the perils of seeking company very much outweighed the potential benefits in most cases. (I focus on this period of my life in a separate part of this memoir.)

By the time I hit age 18, however, my perception of myself and the reality of myself were often miles apart. In some sense, I knew this very fact, and it caused me a feeling of dislocation. That is to say, I had a faint impression that my perception of myself was faulty; I perceived the inadequacy of my self-perception. For instance, I liked to see myself as a rebel's rebel, as someone who did his own thing, who wasn't at all intimidated by authority or the tyranny of conventional wisdom. I'd cultivated and nourished this self-image during my senior year of high school, when I'd written a number of scorchingly-opinionated editorial columns for The Forum, the Paideia High School newspaper. Though very much a liberal at the time, I relished the notion of being a gadfly who occasionally took a radically conservative position just to shake up the complacent establishment. I argued that sex education ought to stress abstinence, and that alcohol ought to be made illegal again, as it was in the days of prohibition. On the subject of abortion, a veritable sacred cow at this most progressive of private high schools (a place where the custom was to call your teacher by his or her first name), I was evenhanded, proclaiming myself "bewildered" as to the ultimate question of permissibility; I conducted an impartial interview with both a staunch pro-lifer from Operation Rescue and an adamant pro-choicer from NARAL. My proclaimed agnosticism on this issue contrasted sharply with the orthodox liberal alarmist rhetoric about a slippery slope towards back alleys, coat-hangers, and women being kept down if the composition of the Supreme Court were to change.

On these matters, and others, I flattered myself on flaunting my independent spirit. But in my self-flattery I was wide of the mark, and partly well-aware of this fact, as I have tried to explain here. I must have appeared arrogant, cocky, and self-possessed to some, but anyone who truly saw me knew that I was actually beneath it all a bundle of quivering insecurities. I had intimately come to know humiliation and shame (these events recounted in juicy purple prose elsewhere), and I quaked before such memories in my not-too-distant past. I desperately hoped that such events and experiences would dissolve from my mind, and that similar ones would never occur in the future. And I had-- as I will likewise tell-- in my own naive way grappled vigorously with the riddle of mortality; in the words of J. Alfred Prufrock, I had "seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker/ And in short, I was afraid."

While I knew that I was hardly the person I pretended to be, I still pretended to believe that I was the person I wished I were. But in fall of 1989, during my first experience with "big time" stage acting, I endured a painful reminder of just how pitiful I remained at my core, all fiercely-worded editorials and occasional performance art antics aside.

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It was a momentous time when it came to world happenings. Astonishing events greeted us on the news every night. The global paradigm we'd grown accustomed to thinking would last forever-- that of the USA and its allies facing off against the USSR and its vassal-states-- suddenly and forcefully shifted when the Communist bloc abruptly imploded under the pent-up pressure of seven decades of repression. Germans jubilantly danced on top of the Berlin Wall and tore out chunks of that long-hated symbol of tyranny; statues of Lenin and Stalin, casting long shadows, were likewise torn asunder.

Yet all of this hubbub, and all of these earth-shaking, history-making, unprecedented events taking place across the globe had but little effect on me at the time; it was all background noise. I was now a college freshman, and consumed with the implications of my new circumstances. The transition had been fairly easy; I hadn't spent much time laboring over college applications, fretting about SAT scores, wondering where I was headed. I knew early that I'd been accepted early to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia-- a stone's throw from my house-- where my father was a faculty member in the Psychology department. No... I knew where I was going, but what was I going to do with myself when I got there? Like Zac Effron's character in "Me and Orson Welles," I knew I wanted to "be a part" of the artistic scene, but I didn't as yet have a beat on where I wanted to pour my energy. Did I want to act? Write? Direct? Compose music? I enjoyed the notion of doing all of these things, but I felt no urgency as yet to focus on one thing at the expense of any of the others.

I'd received some amount of recognition for my stage performances of late, having managed to land the lead role in the school play my senior year of high school. The summer between graduating high school and starting college, I'd enrolled in a Shakespearian acting workshop with a dozen or so young aspiring thespians of metro Atlanta. I enjoyed acting, and respected the craft of it, but I held back from the notion of totally embracing it as a career, because I found myself put off by the flightiness, flakiness, and self-absorption so frequently displayed by "actor types"; something in the behavior of "theater people" tended to irritate me; there was a pretentiousness, a phoniness, a forced and mannered giddiness and gaiety of spirit that grated on the nerves. The theater profession, I found, largely consisted of uptight and rigidly controlling personalities who tried to pawn themselves off as charmingly quirky and free-spirited; they tried too hard, and protested too much; they felt themselves to be remarkable, special people who wanted the spotlight at all times. True generosity was rare; ego abounded, ran amok, leading to personality clashes and abundant "drama" even behind the scenes.

Still, annoying as they could be, many actors were genuinely dedicated to their craft, and I found the notion of dissolving one's personality into nothingness and taking on the bodily mannerisms, manner of speech, and personality of a entirely different person to be a wonderfully thrilling challenge. While I never had the nerve to gain weight or do otherwise unhealthy things to my body in order to inhabit a role, I greatly admired a "method" man like Robert DeNiro,who wasn't afraid to put his physical well-being on the line for his art, as when he famously packed on layers of fat to play a middle-aged, washed-up Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull."

I wanted to "be a part of" things, so upon the start of my freshman year, I tried out for a role in the new Theater Emory production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It so happened that there was a new artistic director that year, who was planning a rather unique presentation of Shakespeare's famous magical-realist romantic comedy, a fantastic yet modern production to be staged on a tilted, oval-shaped platform before a surrealistic backdrop of Dali-melted clocks, a production which would feature characters transforming into animals, groping and pawing one another when they weren't twining together and orgasmically moaning beneath a thin, cotton blanket, the entire lurid procedings set to a 60s rock soundtrack. It was Shakespeare filtered through warmed-over baby-boomer era sexual libertinism, and in in the final analysis quite silly, but visually and conceptually arresting just the same.

I, of course, had no idea what I was stepping into when I entered Studio Annex B, the "black box" theater practice room on campus at the time, with an assigned monologue from Puck, the mischievous sprite of the forest fairies. My lines, I recall, were the ones Puck speaks to Oberon upon finding that Titania has been tricked into falling in love with the hapless Bottom, the pompous would-be leader of the play's working-class acting troupe. I knew next to nothing about the play at that time, but I remember playing up Puck's impishness, making him laugh hysterically at the line, "Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass," like it was all a terrific joke, one that he'd enjoyed immensely.

Vincent Murphy, newly-minted head honcho of Theater Emory, sat behind a table. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on "Vinny," as he preferred to be addressed. A roguishly handsome fortyish man of Boston Irish descent, Vinny apparently had a sterling background in the theater industry. With his full head of touseled hair and trademark scarf thrown round his neck, he cut a dashing, dandyish figure; it was easy to see why he was such a hit with the ladies, his crooked teeth and relentless coffee-and-cigarette breath notwithstanding. Vinny had, I was soon to learn, two very divergent personalities: the one he commonly shared with the outside world was charming, humorous, and self-effacing; the other, which he mostly showed in his capacity as a director, was intense, critical, hectoring, and cruel.

On this occasion, Vinny seemed mortally offended by my impromptu interpretation of the Puck speech. He told me to do it again, only this time with the awareness that it was an evil, atrocious thing for Titania to be abused in such a manner. He acted like I should really have known better, like my hysterically chortling version of Puck was an affront to all things decent. I found his self-righteousness on this point somewhat grating and obnoxious, but kept my indignation to myself, and duly delivered the speech in a chastened, mournful tone. Next, I was asked to read as Demetrius, a young man who had fallen in love with a girl named Hermia, but whose love was unrequited. In the process of reading, I was asked to transform into an animal. Not sure what to think of this bizarre task, but not questioning it, I became a howling wolf, braying "HEEERRMMIA! OOOOOOOOOWWWWW!" until I was red in the face.

Vinny seemed much more pleased this time, and sent me on my way with a faint smile. Later, I found that my wolf had landed its prey: I got the part of Demetrius.

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So there I was: a gawky, frizzy-haired freshman, carrying his long, lanky self with a heaping helping of faux-confidence; a fragile little 18-year old boy with big dreams, truckloads of energy and imagination, but no particular focus, waiting for life to give him a cue... And now I had a large role in a big-time Shakespeare play on a major college campus. It was all a bit much to handle. The stress that accumulated over the next few weeks was so dizzyingly intense, I'm not sure how I emerged from the experience without developing an ulcer.

First of all, as I soon found, Vinny Murphy's vision of Shakespeare was, you could say, SUBAR; that is, sexed-up beyond all recognition. As one of the play's young lovers, I was asked to fondle my stage-girlfriend Helena, and to groan and grunt sensually while under a blanket-like scrim atop the weird, disorienting tilted oval stage. Later, during the middle part of the play, when the two young tumultous couples run into the woods and come under the spell of the forest fairies, who cause untold havoc with their misplaced sprinklings of "love juice" upon the heads of dozing, interloping humans, we all were to end up rolling on the floor in a kind of orgiastic group-grope, during which it wasn't at all clear who was "with" whom. As an 18-year old male, at the mercy, not of fantasy-world love potions but of real-world hormones; and being at the time relatively, nay thoroughly sexually inexperienced, this circumstance was incredibly bizarre and uncomfortable. There was a thrill to it as well, of course-- I'd be lying if I claimed otherwise-- but mostly it was embarrassing; it made me feel vulnerable and exposed.

My stage "girlfriend" Helena, in real-life an odd but not unshapely senior girl, would insist on playing backstage improv games to get into character, which consisted of flirty interplay just before a scene, and then (even more so), just before the lights were dimmed before an actual performance. I will leave it to the reader's imagination to conclude how being in close proximity to moaning, undulating, wriggling females on stage can be a perilous situation indeed for a young man; thankfully, my costume was loose and baggy-- a lot of excitement could safely be hidden therein...

As though being thrust into the position of soft-porn Shakespearian thespian weren't enough, I also had to deal with being directed by Vinny, the pompous perv who'd dreamed all this crazy shit up to begin with. It is fair to say that I disliked Vinny from the very start, but this memoir isn't so much about Vinny's character flaws as it is about my quivering youthful cowardice, my failure to stand up to him. I, a fellow who'd long prided himself on doing his own thing, being his own man, taking crap from no one, standing firm on his principles and refusing to conform to social pressure or cave to authority-- I, of all people, allowed myself to be bossed and bullied by this effete, insufferable, scarf-modeling, self-important baby boomer. Why?

There is something in the very act of acting that entails a willingness to put oneself at the mercy of others. It follows that when one is vulnerable, he is also highly suggestible. Thus a director-- being, as he is, in charge of people who at times must empty themselves and tear away their own defenses for the sake of performance --has enormous power. It is power that, in the wrong hands, can be mightily abused, and unfortunately it often is, since those who seek positions of control often do so precisely because they enjoy lording their authority over others. This applies as much in the realm of the arts as it does anywhere else, and it's foolishly naive to believe otherwise; those drawn to the performing arts might think that they're somehow immune to these base motivations, since "art" itself is such an inherently noble and elevated endeavor, but any real experience working with "artsy" people will disabuse one of this at once pollyannish and snobbish notion. The truth is, the theater industry attracts as many scoundrels, charlatans, and manipulative, self-aggrandizing creeps as any other industry-- perhaps more.

However, my suggestibility is only a part of the explanation for my weakness back in the fall of 1989, while rehearsing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as reimaged by Vinny Murphy at Theater Emory. I was young, new to the college setting, and eager to make a good impression. I wanted to "be a part of things" in the arts world, and I felt privileged and slightly bewildered at having been cast in a major role, having to memorize Elizabethan English I barely understood. Take all of these things together and stir: my tender age, my youthful insecurity (in plain sight under an unconvincing veneer of cockiness), the ordeal of performing in a large role in a high-stakes staging of a classic play, filled with sex, sex, and more sex, at a time when sexuality was still a vast and dangerous mystery; throw in an imperious and belittling director, and it's easy to see how I was helpless before a devastating "perfect storm."

***********************************************************************
Vinny, as I mentioned earlier, had two very different personalites. This Jekell and Hyde syndrome is, I think, a common trait among driven, savvy, and successful people. There was the "good" Vinny, which he showed the world--aimiable, affable, easygoing-- and the one he more often displayed to his underlings-- harsh, demanding, and abrasive. At public functions where he was the face of Theater Emory, Vinny smiled, joked, cajoled, and did the "nice guy" routine, taking humility at times to a striking if contrived extreme, as during his first ever appearance as Emory, when he laid on the floor and invited students and staff to "walk all over" him.

But during rehearsals, a very different V-man made himself known. One refrain I particularly remember from Vinny the director was when he would snap "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!"We would be in the middle of working on a scene, usually involving some heavy petting and fondling, with me there in the middle of the mess, terrified of sprouting an erection and feeling sure that I was a fraud with no real skill among numerous paid actors with years of experience. Then it would get worse.

"Hold!" Vinny would shout. "Demetrius (he called us by our character name), what are you doing?" I would instinctively look up and be instantly, scornfully rebuked-- "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!"-- and would duly look back down at the actress with her hand on my thigh. "Demetrius... you've GOT to use your stage savvy here! You've got to make an acting CHOICE! Right now, I'm looking at you, and I'm seeing NOTHING!" He spoke in a nagging, condescending tone, critical in the extreme, without giving much specific guidance, and certainly with no hint of reassurance. The point always seemed to be that you were wasting his and your fellow actors' time, that you were insulting Shakespeare, a great man who really deserved better, that your incompetence was galling, and that he (Vinny) was a prince for putting up with someone who knew so little about acting, but that his patience was wearing thin, and with good reason... after all, just look at you! You suck!

The worst thing was how he would call you out and expose what he felt were your faults in front of everyone else. You'd be in the middle of a scene with other actors, and you'd hear him shout "Hold!"... and your heart would sink. If you dared not freeze and stay "in the moment," facing your fellow cast members-- if, that is, you dared look up, even for a split second.. you'd be thundered upon again: "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!" Then he would tell you just how poorly you were doing, how you clearly didn't get it, how you ought to know better and it was really inconsiderate of you to take up precious rehearsal time with your lack of preparedness...

I wasn't the only actor that Vinny picked on. I'm not claiming he had any personal vendetta against me. And I'm certainly not saying that my acting was anything close to perfection. I was largely a Shakespeare novice (my summer at the Oglethorpe workshop notwithstanding), and could indeed have used some useful direction, some constructive criticism on how best to recite lines in Elizabethan iambic pentameter while girls are grinding their crotches at you and sticking their tongues in your mouth. And I'm sure that my performance could stand to be vastly improved even if I weren't being forced to do "sensual Shakespeare for dummies."

Still, the manner with which Vinny delievered his critiques didn't invite reflection, only fear. The best directors, after all, challenge their actors without deprecating and humiliating them in front of their peers. Let's even say that the worst were true, that I (and the others whom Vinny made an effort to single out for barbaric ridicule) really did suck. If this were true, then 1) why did he cast me in this role?, and 2) how did I stand to improve if all I heard, in a general way, was that I sucked?

Looking back now, it becomes clear that Vinny's harsh words were obviously not meant to be instructive. Instead, his behavior was all about asserting power and dominance. Vinny was simply a bully who got off on making those beneath him feel lousy. Like all bullies, he never picked on those his own size. Indeed, I began to notice that union politics, of all things, played a role in the pecking order of which Vinny was the Alpha dog. One actor who continually got pummelled with invective, a very nice, stocky, balding guy who played Egeus, and whose name I don't recall, was a non-Equity actor. Students with little clout, freshmen like myself and some others, got lashed hard, while others who were juniors and seniors and who were officers in student theater groups on campus, were left alone. Meantime, professional Equity (that is, union) actors, were coddled, if anything. I do not recall Vinny ever daring to utter a single critical or discouraging word to Atlanta acting fixtures like Brenda Bynum (who played Hippolita/Titania) or Jeffrey Watkins (who played Thesus/Oberon). Of course, the experienced actors were probably less likely to need correction or criticism, but still, the inequality of abuse was nothing if not savage. Yet we all, without exception, endured it. What was our excuse? Why did we not stand up, if not for ourselves, then for each other?

The influence of the unionism in fact contributed greatly to the disagreeable aura of fear and dread that surrounded this show, in ways I hadn't at first imagined. I particularly recall an unpleasant moment with our stage manager, a squat queenly man with glasses and a beard. On a day of a performance, we had to check a box on a sheet that hung outside the dressing room, indicating that we were present. I was in a jocular mood one day-- God only knows why-- and instead of X-ing the box, I wrote "yo!" inside of it. Later that day, the bearded queen walked up to me with a stern, reproachful look, holding a clipboard (stage managers love their clipboards). In a scornful voice, he asked me, "Andy what do you call this?" He poked a chubby finger on my juvenile but harmless (or so I thought) "yo!" salutation. I grinned sheepishly, but his huffy countenance didn't alter one whit. I stammered something like, "Well, it's.... you know....it's just...how I signed in..." and he angrily interrupted: "Do you know that if this were an all-Equity show, that would be grounds for a fine??"

Oh, how I would love to be transported back to my skinny teenage body to relive this moment! I'd tell that mincing, scolding priss just where he could shove his threatened union fine! (Come to think of it, that reply may even have excited him a little...) Unfortunately, at the time, when it counted, I had no such gumption. Instead, I meekly apologized, and the drama queen lowered his schoolmarm's glare and ambled away, shaking his head.

*****************************************************************
Yet again, I am faced with the rude question: Why did I tolerate being lectured so vigorously over something so incredibly stupid? Again, I chalk my cowardice up largely to youth and inexperience, but I think there is something more to it. Because, to repeat, it wasn't just about me; others were getting knocked around and roughed up too. In the aftermath of the "yo" brouhaha, I remember my fellow cast member, Ted Denious, who played my stage rival Lysander, sulkily asking me if I'd gotten "yelled at" as well; it seems that he also had committed the unforgiveable sin of writing a cheeky greeting on the attendance sheet. Someone was always bitching somebody out about something, it seemed-- the powerful feeding on the weak, the weak "learning their place," learning that it was somehow (for some unspoken reason) out of line for them to fight back. No one intervening, no one taking up for themselves or for anyone else... it is a scenario that in my grizzled old age I have come to recognize as all too familiar.

Is it the natural order of the world, this tendency? And if so, is nature really such a great thing to emulate? Perhaps artificiality should be our guide instead.

********************************************************************
Whatever the case, my "nature" at that time made me stay the course, convinced me to keep my legitimate complaints to myself. I suppose there were some benefits to this choice. The abuse mainly ceased after several grueling weeks of rehearsal; our director became "nice guy Vinny" once the show opened; he palled around and joked with the very ones whose spirits he'd crushed and whose egos he'd stomped on just a few days earlier. I think we were happy to see this change; I certainly was-- I was so relieved, in fact, that I forgot I'd ever experienced Vinny's mean and cruel side.

And indeed, clever and crafty mean people-- be they psychopathic killers or just plain garden variety dickheads-- are never vicious bastards all of the time; going this route, they are aware, would only make them hated. Smart and canny self-centered sadistic manipulators know that, pleasurable as it may be to kick your lessers around, you also have to be nice to them sometimes; this way, you can make those stupid suckers actually like you. Weak and unpopular people, after all, crave the recognition of their rulers; it helps them to feel better connected in their sad, lonely world. Charismatic bullies become popular through empolying this very push-pull dynamic; they establish their dominance through fear and intimidation, then act like they are buddies with those they victimized, and in so doing convince their victims that it really wouldn't be fair to hold their bullying behavior against them. And their weak, spineless victims almost invariably go right along with it-- they are played like fiddles, jerked around like puppets, led to do the bidding of the very ones they ought to resist, manipulated into worshipping the tyrants who cause their misery.

As for myself, I would even act in another "Vinny" production as a sophomore (a significantly less sexed-up version of Moliere's "The School For Wives"-- heck, I guess even sex maniacs need to chill out with a post-coital cigarette every now and then...). I took some crap from Vinny during this production, but not nearly as much; I suppose I wasn't quite as ripe for the picking anymore. I had a pretty good run of roles in various plays at Emory until my senior year, when I abruptly decided to ditch theater for good. And in both "Midsummer" and "School" I was singled out for passing praise in an Atlanta newspaper article, which of course was exciting (since I still naively believed at the time that most critics know what the hell they're talking about).

Still... I cannot help but conclude that in staying the course and taking my lumps, I really screwed up quite badly. Indeed, if I had to be on that 1989 production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Emory University again, I would make a radically different "acting choice": that is, I would have quit. I'd have interrupted one of Vinny's insulting tirades to inform him that he shouldn't talk to people that way, that he ought to treat his actors with respect, that having talent and an extensive repertoire is no excuse to be a jerk.

Oh well-- too late now. Over two decades have passed. Vinny himself, I hear, has retired. The Cold War paradigm, which ended with a bang in late 1989, is now ancient history. Most of the students I teach today go blank when I mention the Berlin Wall. Everything changes. The past recedes.

Then again, IS it too late? After all, pace William Faulkner, "the past isn't gone; it's not even past." Given this profound paradox (unearthed by a brilliant, if often incomprehensible Southern drunkard), is it ever really too late to correct a past mistake?

At age 18-- contrary to my grandiose self-understanding at the time-- I was a coward and a pushover. Now, as I near the start of my fifth decade on this earth, I have grown some backbone, sprouted some guts, achieved some level of testicular fortitude. And so I say, in a sense twenty-something years too late, but in a Faulknerian way right on time:

Fuck you, Vinny! Find yourself a new Demetrius, you overscarved, oversexed, mean, pretenious artfag. I quit.

So... DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE! See ya. Peace out.

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR UNITY '08: MY ADDRESS TO AMERICA

2008-10-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

My fellow Americans,

We do have our differences with one another. Never is this truth more self-evident than in an election season, when fundamentally divergent first principles have the "reds" and "blues" at each other's throats. The strife inherent in such a cultural (if not actually physical) civil war can have a profoundly disruptive effect on a sensitive person's spirit.

That said, dear citizens, I must relate that I have great news! Having spent a good deal of time examining the roots of our societal conflict, I have reached a surprising and happy conclusion: We are not as different as we may think. Our nation need not divide into petty sectionalism or tear itself apart over divisive political and social issues any more. Rejoice, fellow Americans! Our seeming divide is nothing but an illusion. On one core matter, we are in fact completely in agreement.

Let it be said, nay shouted, loud and clear, and with pride. We are not Republicans or Democrats, left-wing or right-wing, Northern or Southern, black, white, brown, or yellow. We are Americans! Let us cease our silly, destructive, partisan rhetoric, and come together as one. Let us admit our most crucial commonality.

The fact is, we are all heartily in favor of murdering children.

We only disagree on which children ought to be murdered, and when. We agree on the principle, and differ only on the particulars.

Democrats, the so-called blue-staters, prefer child-murder to be carried out by abortionists, while Republicans, the red state faction, have a slightly different idea: they want children not to be aborted, but rather bombed and/or shot.

Really, when you look at it closely, are these two stances all that different? The red-staters are down on the blue-staters for condoning, even encouraging abortion, and wanting it in all cases to remain "legal and safe." Yet red-staters are adamantly in favor of "getting tough" in wartime. Their spiritual ancestors, whom they still revere for their "moral clarity," cheered when Air Force pilots reduced Axis cities to rubble during World War II, and in so doing murdered and mangled untold thousands of children, including many still in their mothers' wombs.

Today, red state America yearns for a return to an age when people didn't wring their hands over civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military, but instead simply understood that "war is hell," and you do what you have to do to prevail. Or as one red stater-- speaking for many others-- recently wrote, "A carpetbombed Nazi is better than an un-carpetbombed Nazi." (One could just as easily substitute "Jap," "gook," "commie,""jihadi," "raghead," Baathist," or whatever other term of derision is appropriate for the given war.)

Meantime, the "peacenik" blue state faction gets up in arms, as it were, about the red-stater's callous indifference towards enemy civilian casualties, without realizing how closely aligned this view is in fact with his own. Perhaps it would be helpful for him, if the next time he sees a picture of a dead Iraqi child on the internet, he pictures in its place the bloodied corpse of an aborted baby. After making this mental substitution, I'm hopeful that the blue-stater can put aside his petty differences with the red stater (that is to say, over which child it's okay to destroy and which it's a travesty to murder), and see the glorious commonality that makes them both such great Americans.

The red-stater, when forced to view an image that he doesn't like, such as bodies of Iraqi children killed by U.S. bombs or bullets, becomes angry-- not at the fact that the children were murdered (since he knows that war is hell and you do what you have to do in order to win), but at the people who took the picture, and what he thinks such an image will do to affect the war effort and the morale of the soldiers. The blue-stater, when forced to see the little body of a child slaughtered by an abortionist, has a strikingly similar response. The picture doesn't make him ponder the brutality and inhumanity of abortion; rather, he is angered that someone would be so "tacky" as to put such an image on display, when the real issue should be "reproductive rights" and "a woman's right to choose," and so forth.

Do you not see, red- and blue-state American, just how similar you truly are? Can we all get along? Does it really matter that one of our Presidential candidates makes jokes about bombing a foreign country and massacring its civilians, while the other has never met an infanticide he didn't like and didn't want funded with taxpayer dollars? Look at one another, "red" and "blue" Americans, and you will see a mirror image of yourself, only with a different complexion. Judge not by the color of the person's state, but by the content of that state's character.

To America!

God bless us, every one!

Thank you, and good night.

Andy Nowicki's Books and How to Obtain Them

2008-07-30T17:18:00.001-07:00

I'm adding a post after a year and a half hiatus in order to give information regarding my recent written work, and the means by which you may obtain said work.

For starters, I still have some spare copies of my book THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LIBERALISM, published by Selah in 2002, which is no longer available on amazon.com (although a link to it still exists there). I have also recently completed a work, as yet unpublished, called LETTERS TO AN ABORTED CHILD, which tackles the tragedy of abortion from a unique perspective. Anyone who would like a copy of either should send a check for $8 to:

Andy Nowicki
724 Kadi Ln.
Hinesville, Ga. 31313

I'm also pleased to announce that a work I completed in 2006, entitled CONSIDERING SUICIDE, will be published by Nine Banded Books in 2009. Stay tuned for more information.

And of course, I continue to contribute columns to THE LAST DITCH, at www.thornwalker.com/ditch.

Adieu for now.

Greetings and Adieu from 2007

2007-01-05T12:17:00.000-08:00

Well, as y'all may have discovered, I haven't been posting much lately. My motivation for posting here has just gone into decline in the last month and a half or so. I think that's due to a variety of reasons. I don't really know what I'm trying to accomplish with this blog. I don't want to reflect on world events or culture wars or other dreary things (as I have many times before, here and elsewhere). So what else is there to write about? Myself? I'm not naive enough to think that anyone other than me would be interested in hearing about my day-to-day activities and thoughts. I could talk about cute things my kids have said lately, but I'm really not that kind of guy. And I don't think you're that kind of audience, either.

I'd like to be able to write something that may be of interest to a greater number of readers. I'm puzzling that notion over right now. But making cute little entries here about this or that just strikes me as pointless at this point. I'll keep "dyspeptic myopic" up just in case in the future I change my mind, which is possible. Anyone who wants can check the archives to see the incredibly clever and witty things I've said about life, the universe, and everything. Maybe I'll grow whimsical again, and return to this format soon. I'm leaving that option open for myself.

By the way, I've got something (relatively) new up at The Last Ditch. www.thornwalker.com/ditch -- then click on my name.
So long for now...

Another New Chapter of POSSESSED BY DEATH posted

2006-12-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

Chapter 5, that is.

Again at www.possessedbydeath.blogspot.com

New Chapter of POSSESSED BY DEATH posted

2006-12-12T12:26:00.000-08:00

Chapter 4-- it's taken a while to compose; hence the Nov. 17 date over the top (that was the day I started the chapter; I just finished it today).

www.possessedbydeath.blogspot.com

APOCALYPTO Now

2006-12-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

The critics are mostly grudgingly agreeing that Mel Gibson's latest, APOCALYPTO, is a well-made movie. After all, no matter how much you hate the guy, no matter how much you may want to see him fail and or witness his career come to an end, you can't just dismiss the obvious. APOCALYPTO is, in spite of its flaws, an extraordinary film. And it's a film that the critics wouldn't dare to criticize, were it done by anyone other than Mel Gibson. After all, it's subtitled, it features a no-name cast of Central American actors, and it's about Indians who lived six centuries ago. If not for the fact that Mel made it, disliking the film would be construed as small-minded, possibly even racist.

But since it's by Mel, a straight white Catholic male who's said some un-kosher things about Jews in the recent past, it's a little chancy to admire APOCALYPTO, much as the movie shouts to be admired (even if not liked) in so many ways.

Of course, if not for the fact that Mel made it, and if not for the fact that Mel's name is on it, there's no way APOCALYPTO would be seen by so many people, or be making the kind of money that it's making. After all... it's subtitled, it features a no-name cast of Central American actors, and it's about Indians who lived six centuries ago. Not exactly what most would consider blockbuster material, no matter how spiced up it may be with violence and gore.

What's truly interesting about the movie is the fact that is seems to be an allegory, designed to have relevance for our own times. As much is indicated by the fact that it begins with a portentous quotation from a modern philosopher about civilizations never being conquered from without until they are destroyed from within. The film depicts the ancient Mayan culture at its most decadent, with the practice of human sacrifice at its apex, just before the arrival of the Spanish Conquestadors. Since we too are fond of human sacrifice (albeit of a more discreet form), and we too find ourselves menaced by a foreign religious ideology (who threatens to conquer not so much through brute force as through simulatanous terror attacks and slow demographic absorbtion), it's hard to ignore that APOCALYPTO is not only about then, but now as well.

Despite a bit of puerile sexual humor, and lots of gratuitous mayhem (tigers chewing off faces, impalings, bludgeonings, and the like), APOCALYPTO succeeds beautifully as both a rip-roaring action-adventure tale and as a grim meditation on the downfall of civilization. In short, you should see it, whoever you may be.

I Find This Astonishing

2006-12-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

It seems that British PM Tony Blair (known as Phony Tony by his enemies, after the fashion of Slick Willie on these shores) has made a speech declaring that the "multicultural experiment" in Great Britian is "over." From now on, he said, immigrants need to conform to British culture-- learning the language, abiding by the customs, etc. "If you're not interested in assimilating, we don't want you," was his message in a nutshell. Most felt that his speech was directed at Muslims.

Now he's Phony Tony, a consummate politician, so he probably doesn't believe a word of it. That's not really relevant. What's interesting is that he seems to feel the need to say these words at all-- that it's expedient to issue such a decree in jolly old England these days. As Limbaugh observed today, no American politican would dare to make such a declaration over here, and I always thought that as PC-whipped as we are, the Euros were far worse. So what gives, I wonder?

Kramer Vs. Kramer

2006-11-27T05:41:00.000-08:00

(I flirted with titling this post "Kramer Vs. Nigger," but thought that might be easily misunderstood, enamored as I am of shock value. I have no sympathy for racial hatred, but I also refuse to be cowed by empty-headed liberal pieties on race-- it's a balancing act.)

Once more, we see an obviously already troubled and psychologically unstable celebrity destroy his career before our eyes by doing the one unforgivable thing: insult a racial or ethnic group designated as "extra-special protected." The guy from Seinfeld and Weird Al Yankovic's underrated comedy classic "UHF" is catching all kinds of hell for responding to hecklers at a stand-up comedy show with the dreaded "n-word." Of course, the guy from Seinfeld was also called a "cracker" over the course of this exchange, but equally of course, that's considered utterly irrelevant to the story. The use of the word that cannot be named but which rhymes with "trigger" is the main point here. Nothing else matters.

To be fair, I don't know who started slinging the racial epithets first, the black hecklers or the white comedian. The question of "who started it" is not irrelevant, and I don't mean to dismiss it here, but I do know one thing damn well: were it a black comedian getting called "snigger without the s" by a white heckler, it wouldn't matter if the comedian started the ugliness by calling the heckler a "cracker" (notice how I don't have to disguise the epithet for white people? Gee, why is that-- perhaps because whites aren't stamped "extra-special protected" in today's world the way many other groups are?) first-- the story would be about how the black comedian was called a name that no black person, under any circumstances, should ever, ever-- EVER!!!-- be called, no matter what.

Kramer is no Mel Gibson, but like Mel, he's likely to be ostracized by "respecable" people from here on in, no matter how much he apologizes for his rash and imprudent behavior on this one occasion. Like Mel, he's got tons of cash, so the end of his career really shouldn't be regarded as too great a tragedy. Still, fair is fair, and double standards are double standards; the upshot of events like this is to further fuel resentment among white working folks who can't just retire with their millions, like Kramer and Gibson can. This reasonable resentment, in turn, can only be exploited by true apostles of racial hatred-- Nazis and Klansmen and what-not. It ultimately benefits nobody to hold the screws to one racial group while giving everyone else a pass.

No Holiday Felgercarb Here

2006-11-27T05:21:00.000-08:00

"Felgercarb," as I knew back when I was a sci-fi nerd, was the ridiculous invented profanity used in the old (and to my mind, the only true) version of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. Used here, it is meant to indicate that I have no intention of stopping down my incisive cultural commentary or whatever it is I do here in order to bore everybody by expostulating on What I Am Thankful For or What Christmas Means to Me or any other such thing. Holiday season is an excuse to get unbearably hokey for a lot of folks. Not moi. I plan to be as rude and as plain spoken as ever for the next few weeks and beyond.

Another Latest at The Last Ditch

2006-11-16T17:05:00.000-08:00

www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_dissent_punishment.htm

Abortion: Blame the Judges, Blame the Politicians, Blame the People, Blame Everybody!

2006-11-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

Republicans have made a lot of political hay with conservative religious types with the "judge" issue. And from a sheer Realpolitik standpoint, they have been wise so to do. After all, Roe V. Wade was an unconstitutional travesty, as well as a moral atrocity, and right-thinking folks are well aware of the slide towards totalitarianism implicit in the "living document" school of constitution-parsing which birthed (pardon the bitterly ironic pun) decisions like Roe. The GOP might not care too much about the tens of millions of bloody and mangled baby corpses that have piled up in this country since 1973, but they know a political opportunity when they see it. So Republicans have banged the gong of judge-appointments, saying in effect, "If you're against abortion, vote for us! We'll give you judges and justices that will overturn Roe and other instances of judicial tyranny."

But voting Republican won't end legalized abortion. Republicans need abortion to be around so they can appeal to their base. They are also aware that most people aren't thoroughly anti-abortion, even if they aren't entirely comfortable with abortion on demand; thus, they are leery about doing anything other than making oblique gestures towards restoring a culture of life. G.W. Bush is a prime example. While a candidate for president, he declared himself, when asked in an interview, to be "pro-life," but he didn't elaborate. The vagueness was deliberate, and so is his consistent refusal to stick his neck out on this matter since taking office. Bush, like all Republicans, knows where his bread is buttered. In a democracy (duh mockery-acy) a politician can only prostitute himself to his constituents. It's the American way. Cue theToby Keith soundtrack, or the Lee Greenwood, if you prefer.

The point is, it's shortsighted to blame judges for our country's moral depravity. It's far worse than that. Abortion isn't legal just because judges disengenously "re-interpreted" the Constitution and "disovered" a right to murder babies. They certainly did so, and consequently they have a lot of innocent blood on their hands. But abortion wouldn't still be legal today if most Americans didn't want it to remain legal. Can we please get off the populist soapbox, fellow conservatives? It's not an issue of Judges Vs. America or Hollywood vs. America (TM Michael Medved) or Elites Vs. America. It's Voting Americans Vs. Unborn Americans. And given that it's a battle between the murderously-inclined and the helpless, guess who's winning? Guess who'll continue to win?

Our nation's moral conscience has been dulled; our collective heart has been hardened against our own children; if such lives prove "inconvenient" to us, we have few compunctions about hiring a contract killer to wipe them out. And given what we have become, I'm supposed to want to see us win victories abroad? Count me out. I'm not sure that we're any better than the jihadists. I'm not at all sure it wouldn't be best if they won and we lost.

I Haven't Voted, And I Won't, So F___ Off!

2006-11-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

...my rejoinder to all of the smug little stickers that people like to wear on their chests on days like this.

Dumb-ocracy. Duh-mocracy. Demon-ocracy.

Fug it.

I wrote this over two years ago, and it's as true today as ever:
www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_democracy.htm

New Chapter of POSSESSED BY DEATH posted

2006-11-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

Read it and creep:
www.possessedbydeath.blogspot.com

"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot"

2006-11-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

So said Mark Antony after successfully rousing the rabble against Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR. Antony's speech, in which he incited a riot against his enemies, all the while protesting that they were "honorable men," is a masterpiece of wicked and sly demaogogery. Its sheer disengenousness is grimly hilarious; Antony clearly wants the men who assassinated Casear to run afoul of a hateful mob, to be lynched, tortured, drawn and quartered, or worse... but he keeps insisting that he has nothing against Caesar's killers, all the while stirring up resentment against them through masterfully underhanded rhetoric.

Today, mischief is afoot. The Republicans smell blood. Poor, hapless, pompous fool John F. Kerry has given the long-embattled GOP a chance to rally their forces a mere week prior to midterm elections. His seemingly snotty comments about U.S. troops in Iraq, apparently implying that they were stupid failures (in spite of ineffectual post-speech spin during which he claimed merely to have botched a joke intended to be about President Bush) has helped to reinforce the image of Democratic elites as rich, snotty people who look down their noses at common folk, i.e., churchgoing country hicks who do things like live in red states and watch professional wrestling and shop at Walmart and join the military. Likely Republican voters whose predominant inclination had been disenchantment with the performance of their own party now seem to have rediscovered their fear and loathing of the opposition. People are calling talk radio and angrily insisting, "My son/my dad/my uncle/my nephew is serving in Iraq and he isn't stupid-- I don't care what Kerry says!" Bush and his people have expertly stoked the fires of people's indignation; indeed, they would have been stupid not to. Whether it will ultimately save the GOP from defeat remains to be seen, but it certainly seems as though Senior "Lurch" has awakened the sleeping, if not comatose, giant that is the Republican base.

Now, little as I respect the Republicans, corrupt and useless as they mostly are, I despise the Democrats. I hope the Repugs pull it out, if only for the sake of the appointment of judges that may have a chance of actually upholding Constitutional law and ending the unconsitutional travesty (and moral atrocity) that was Roe V Wade. Not that I think the GOP really cares a fig about the evil of abortion, but I know the Deathocrats don't.

Still, minimally heartened as I am by the prospect of the lesser of two evils winning, I am less impressed than ever with this "democratic process" thing. For voters aren't much better than Mark Antony's mob. They do little more than "sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn," favoring one party when the other does or says something tacky, then blowing the other way when the other party says or does something no more tacky, but closer in temporal proximity to election day. If the GOP holds the House and Senate this year, it will be because Mark Foley was outed as a perv slightly before John Kerry was confirmed to be an ass. Why is that supposed to make me proud to be an American?

Fox-y Whore

2006-10-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

Really, is there anything more American than Parkinson's-afflicted Michael J. Fox whoring out his diseased body, complete with its useful, irresistibly tragic tics and convulsions, to the Democratic party and the Culture of Death?

Okay, that sounds harsh, if not to Mr. Alex P. Keaton aka Marty McFly, then to A-mur-ica itself, but then the truth is often harsh. I don't envy Mr. Fox for what he has to endure these days from his terrible, progressively deterioriating condition. But appropriate sympathy for a person who is acutely suffering a severe variation of what Shakespeare's greatest character called "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" doesn't mean that person ought to be viewed as above criticism. If a person who is suffering uses his suffering to advance a sinful cause in a sleazy manner, he ought to be called on it. Herr Limbaugh, while not terribly responsible in his rhetoric on the subject, was correct in the substance of his critique of Micheal J. The spectacle of a suffering man does not make what's wrong into what's right, or vice versa, nor does it convert disengenous political doubletalk into truth.

Unfortunatly, these points are lost on most Americans today. We are awash in sentimentalism (see my point from last week under the title "Crowd Shots"), and we enjoy the maudlin, unseemly activity of wallowing in the victimhood of others.

But that isn't the worst of it. Not only do we enjoy the sight of others in terrible suffering, we feel ourselves made virtuous by such tawdry voyeurism. There is a tendency toward self-righteousness that invariably seems to seep in, as can be seen in the reactions of some to Limbaugh's supposed "insensitiveness." When someone reasonably questions the motives or the inherent goodness of an outwardly suffering person, the questioner is met with the typical "how dare you!!" riposte. The sufferers, it seems, are beyond reproach-- as long as they are on what the elites deem to be the "proper" side of the issues. (Has anyone shed any tears lately over, say, the increasing infirmity of the aging Hutton Gibson, Mel's dad? Well, no, of course not-- he's a reactionary Catholic and a Holocaust denier, not a crusader for the killing and harvesting of babies... One holocaust is bad, the other good; get it?)

Overheard on Talk Radio-- Giving the Devil His Due

2006-10-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

Neal Boortz: I find him obnoxious much of the time, and often not in a good way (there's good and bad obnoxiousness-- "good" obnoxiousness is crass but entertaining; "bad" obnoxiousness is crass and unimaginative), especially when he engages in Christian-baiting or boorishly mocks pro-lifers, but I'll give my fellow opinionated baldy his due-- he's brighter than your average talk radio host, and more willing to think for himself. Example: yesterday I heard him actually break from the GOP cheerleader talk radio party line and express doubt about the efficacy of voting Republican in November.

"If we vote them back in," he said (paraphrasing), "after they've done little but increase spending and the size of government for the time they've been in office, they'll be incredibly cocky-- they'll feel like they can get away with anything, and the suckers in their constituency will still vote them right back into office!" Excellent point, and indicative of a sentiment that indicates a man who can't be bought off, even after being feted by the powers-that-be (including being invited to the White House for a special get together with the prez, along with lots of other talk show blabbers, almost all of whom are more careful to toe the line of said prez).

Gratuitous Crowd Shots-- alternate title: The GAME is the game, damnit!

2006-10-20T07:29:00.000-07:00

I used to be into professional sports a lot more than I am today. One reason I still retain some semblance of interest today is because I think it's a good way to stay "grounded," as it were. People who profess to "hate" sports are usually insular and pretentious jerks. They look down on the vulgar mass of humanity for caring about whether team X will make the playoffs or if player Y will be voted into the Hall of Fame, and other such issues. The insufferable anti-sports snots also love to complain about the "obscene" amount of money professional atheletes make.

Such critiques are cliched and tiresome. If some people are into sports, why should that matter to anyone else? We're all allowed our interests, as long as they aren't evil and as long as they don't become unhealthy obsessions. Likewise, why should we care if athlete guy is making a ton of dough, more than most of us will ever see in our lives? They're able to make that money because they have a talent that lots of people are willing to pay lots of money to go and see. Good for them. Too bad for the rest of us, but it's not their fault that they're talented in this way and we're not. Resenting them for the money they make is like hating Kelly LeBrock, of 80s shampoo commercial fame, for being beautiful.

Of course, the insufferable anti-sports snots aren't completely off the mark in every way. There are plenty of sports fans who are thoroughgoing testosterone-overloaded boors (and bores), who take it all too seriously, who look down on young men who aren't interested in sports, call them "sissies" and "faggots" and altogether take delight in tormenting them. In short, there are those who are as arrogant in their advocacy of sports as the snots are in their contempt for sports. Yet the vast majority of sports fans, I think, don't share this proclivity to bash non-athletes; they figure, in the words of whatever generous chap coined the phrase, "to each his own." Likewise, lots of folks are simply indifferent to sports; they aren't terribly interested themselves, but they don't look down their noses at those who are interested; again, they reckon, "to each his own."

None of the above, of course, is terribly relevant to the point I aimed to make in this post, except that as I watched game 7 of the NLCS last night, I realized that I wasn't the same sports-watcher that I used to be. But as I was watching the thrilling end of the game, in which the St. Louis Cardinals edged the New York Mets 3-1 to win a atrip to the World Series, I got just plain exasperated with the number of crowd shots that the FOX network saw fit to use in between pitches. As the faithful at Shea stood in the rain and hoped against hope that their team could stage a comeback in the bottom of the 9th (a hope that failed to materialize; as the ubiquituous taunting bully on the "Simpsons" would say: "HA-ha!"), the televison camera was sure to include close-up shots of fan after fan wearing rally caps, with hands clasped together in prayer, with stressed-out, pleading expressions on their faces.

It got to the point where I almost shouted: "stop showing the fans, fer cryin' out loud!!" Maybe I'm just old-school, but it seems like this is an effort by the network to overdo the "drama" aspect of the game. Yes, it's very interesting that fans get so bent out of shape over every pitch (in my more ardent sports-guy days, I was one such fan), but it's not really what the network should be focusing on. Their job is to show us what happens on the field, and to leave the reactions to us. The fans are not the game, the spectacle of the fans' nervous reactions to the events on the field is not the game; rather, the game is the game.

I take this trend as yet another example of the sentimentalization of everything in our culture, and our ever-decreasing aptitude for dignified reserve. We can't just take an event for what it is; instead, coverage of the event has to involve the sight of people having an emotional response to the given event. If it weeps, it leads. And sells.

Chapter 2 of POSSESSED BY DEATH Now Posted

2006-10-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

My work in progress continues to progress: www.possessedbydeath.blogspot.com

Democracy Sucks, But It's Interesting

2006-10-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

I must say that I find the system of democracy to be both fascinating and repugnant at the same time. It is certainly a system of paradoxes.

When one looks at the matter plainly, one can see that the rulers of any democratic society are blatantly contemptous of their subjects, treating them as mere means to an end, puppets to be manipulated. Yet democracy masquarades as a system under which the "common folk" are highly valued, and in the course of its regular rites designed to confer legitimacy upon itself--known as elections-- that entity called "the people" are commonly fawned over, stroked, and flattered.

It's a system under which perception almost inevitably comes to be valued more than reality. To be elected, after all, a candidate must say the right things at the right time, push the right buttons, stoke the fires of the right prejudices with the right constituency. Such is the path to the throne; it cannot be otherwise. Honestly, I'd admire one who seizes authority of the state by fiat in a military coup a little bit more than most of the characters we see running for office today. The military dictator at least isn't pretending to hold me in high esteem as he makes his naked grab for the ability to run my life; he's not blowing smoke, claiming that his lunge for the levers of power stems from a desire to "serve the public."

And don't get me started on the phenomenon of opinion polls! Okay, get me started, but I can't finish right now. More later.

First Entry of New Nowicki Masterwork!

2006-10-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

Those of you tired of my constant gloom and doom over current events and what not (i.e., what you see regularly posted on this blog) are hereby informed of a new site in which I will be composing my latest masterpiece in serialized form. It too will probably be gloomy and doomy, in addition to hilarious, prescient, and profound, but at least it won't be about current events and what not. It will simply be about death. The name of the work is, in fact, "Possessed By Death." I have written my first entry today, and it can be found over at www.possessedbydeath.blogspot.com

I will keep my faithful reading public informed about regular additions to this project here, in between regular Dyspeptic Myoptic entries . You are invited to take up and read. It's free! Read it here (or rather, there) before everyone else does...

The Shills Be Illin'

2006-10-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Man, do I ever hate election season. Try as I might, I find I can't avoid hearing the shills for Republicans and Democrats expostulate disengenously. The same tired old slogans, the same scare tactics, the same "if you don't get out there and vote something terrible will happen!" nonsense. Face it, hepcats; it doesn't make a damn bit of difference who you vote for or if you vote at all. It's out of your hands. Don't listen to the shills, and don't pay attention to the operatives from both sides who aim to manipulate you with nebulous stories intended to fill you either with false hope or false despair. Don't do their bidding. Opt out. Realize that politicans are basically interested in nothing but power, and are only interested you as a means to that end. Don't be their tools. Don't vote-- it only encourages them.

V2 Revisited

2006-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

After an exchange of posts of the Jimmy Akin blogsite (www.jimmyakin.org) (under the post of late September entitled "Schism and Mortal Sin") regarding the meaning of Vatican 2, and after some consideration of the whole issue of the dire state of the post-conciliar Church, I have been able to come up with a historical comparison that I think might just be helpful in illustrating my skepticism of the party line stance of many anti-reactionary conservatives within the Church, namely "Vatican 2 wasn't bad in itself, it's just been interpreted badly."

The historical comparison is to Communism. It's often been said, by leftist progressive types, that Communism isn't a bad idea in itself; in fact, it's a very good idea-- it's just never been properly implemented. But history, I think, puts the lie to this facile notion. Every time Communism has been implemented, from Soviet Russia to Maoist China to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to Castro in Cuba, has resulted in oppression, misery, and atrocity. One can reasonably conclude from this fact, I think, that it's not just the application of Communism that's to blame-- rather, that there is something very much to blame in the whole underlying idea of the ideology of Communism itself.

Simiarly with Vatican 2. The conservative anti-reactionaries, who accuse groups like the Society of St. Pius X of being schismatic, say that the problem has never been with the Council itself; instead, the widespread perfidious movements within the Church that have sprung up since the Council have been the result of modernist liberals hijacking the Council's good and proper call for reform and running with it in strange and unseemly directions.

The anti-reactionary conservatives often complain about the disengenous phrase "the spirit of Vatican 2" often used by liberals to justify doing things that have no ground in the actual letter of the documents produced by the Council, but that are nevertheless supposedly legitimized by the Council's attempt at reform.

On this point, I will admit, the conservatives do have a leg to stand on. But only one leg, not two. That is to say, the conservatives are right to complain that the liberals have improperly used Vatican 2 as cover to pursue their radical, modernist agendas. However, I think the conservatives ought to consider being just a bit more critical of the Council itself, considering that every single application of its principles has been an abject failure, resulting in hippie-dippy touchy-feely folky-dokey aesthetics at best, and the introduction of patently heretical notions at worst.

This is why I tend to side with the reactionaries on this matter. Perhaps there is some jaundice in their eyes, but at least they aren't wearing rose-colored glasses, like the anti-reactionary conservatives are.

The String Pullers-- What Are They Up To?

2006-09-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

I see now, somewhat to my dismay, that my blog has become a sort of "eye on the news" affair lately. I am very far from being a news junkie, and in fact I deplore the tendency, rife in our so-called "information age," to overreact to whatever is being broadcast as the latest, juiciest story, to play it up like it's going to lead to the end of the world, before discarding it tomorrow.

Yet I too often find myself doing this very thing. The temptation for a writer, particularly one interested in cultural commentary, to dwell "where it's at" news-wise is very strong. For one thing, it's a good way to attract readers. You give a provocative take on something that everyone's abuzz about (something I find that I'm good at doing from time to time), and people who are busy buzzing will give you a look. Well and good, and except that it makes you feel somewhat like a whore. You've fallen for a trick (and metaphorically speaking, you've "turned a trick"); that is, you've chimed in on a story that's supposed to be a huge deal because all of the news outlets tell us that it's a big deal.

But the fact is that news doesn't break so much as it is manufactured. I sometimes wonder who's pulling our strings, drawing our attention to this or to that, and for what purpose. I hear lately that something like one in three people now believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were an "inside job," i.e. that the American government is responsible for the death and destruction of that day. I don't buy it for a second. I don't think that a third of the American public know a damn thing about 9/11 conspiracy theories. I don't think the vast majority of Americans have given the matter much thought. They may only be vaguely aware that conspiracy theories exist. But a couple of weeks ago, I started hearing alarmist talk from many different sources about how a sizable chunk of the American public is falling for all kinds of kooky and irresponsible notions.

It seems that someone in power wants to make us think that Americans are getting brainwashed into disbelieving the official story about 19 Ay-rab hijackers armed with boxcutters, and buying into a belief in sinister government plots, involving bombs placed in the WTC towers, a missile launched at the Pentagon, and planes run into their targets by remote control. What I'd like to know (since, as I have stated, I strongly suspect that most Americans don't believe in these things, and moreover, aren't even aware of such allegations) is, who wants us to believe that Americans are increasingly tending to believe in such a story, and why do they want us to believe that this is what we believe? Who benefits from such alarmism?

Yes, Loathsome Baby Boomers: You Too Must Die

2006-09-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you have seen one of the more annoying advertisements on TV these days. I can't recall the company's name. (I hardly ever remember the product being sold even when I find a commercial memorable, which shows, I guess, that I have a superior mind impervious to the slick charms of salesmen... but I digress.)

What's being sold is retirement insurance of some sort. The target audience is people nearing retirement right now, which is to say, baby boomers. The theme music is some groovy 60s number, with images of dancing, drug-addled babes at Woodstock, frolicking hippie couples striking cool, "countercultural" poses, and so forth. The voiceover goes something like this: "Retire? Hey, you're the generation that's reinvented everything. You've never played by the rules? Why start now?" Then the former super-8 washed-out 60s photography is replaced by images of these same people, having aged considerably but still young at heart, doing things like hand-gliding, skiing, and other very "active" pursuits.

Obviously, this ad is playing right into the hubris of this already most insufferable of generations. Thanks to the boomers, we have the destruction of just about everything that was once good and decent. The boomers, after all, were the orchestrators of the sexual revolution, which has led to the divorce revolution, which has led to the breakup of the family, which has led to the demise of childhood innocence, which has led to the overt sexualization of children. Now those of us born after the Age of Aquarius trying to raise kids of our own have to contend with the culture they've helped to wreck through their self-indulgent behavior and self-serving ideologies. Thanks a lot, hepcats!

To see them now congratulate themselves for their "accomplishments" through this advertisement is all too typical, but still infuriating. Boomers, allow me to break it to y'all not so gently: yes, you have to retire. Yes, aging means that you physically deterioriate. Much as you may have looked down on your own parents for acting "old" when they got old, you will do the same. No, your insistence on doing it if it feels good, following your bliss, or any other slogan you make up that rationalizes screwing everything in sight regardless of the consequences won't save you from death.

Great are your sins, baby boomers. You will be held accountable. Time to start contemplating that, methinks.

The Hollow Men of Talk Radio

2006-09-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I heard both Bill O'Reilly and Neal Boortz bemoan the fact that there's resistance to the idea of carpet-bombing foreign countries and wiping out thousands of civilians. Both, of course cited World War Two and the US atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pointing out that "this was what it took to end the war."

The logic: it was right to do it then, and it' s right to do it now. Implied premise: We just lack the guts to do something like that now, and it may take another "9/11" finally to give us some backbone.

If that's true, then it's another reason to pray that another "9/11" doesn't happen. If mass murder is the outgrowth of "backbone," then God save us from backbone. If having backbone makes us thirsty for the blood of women and children, then I say we can do without it. For what does it profit a man to gain a backbone and lose his soul? We'd be better off as snakes.

From Boortz, who is sometimes articulate and intelligent, but often stoops to sneering, infantile insults-- he seems to think he's being incredibly brave and clever when he calls religious people ignoramuses-- this rhetoric at least has the benefit of consistency. Boortz is, after all, a proponent of abortion, and if you're in favor of killing the innocent in one way, why not branch out and stump for other types of human slaughter?

For O'Reilly, who is ostensibly a pro-life Catholic, however, such talk is all too representative of the typical "conservative" talk radio host, who (as I have shown in prior entries) is only selectively in favor of protecting innocent life. Or, more accurately, who postures in such a way that at least makes it appear that he's in favor of protecting certain lives (i.e. the unborn), while openly showing a callous disregard for the lives of people who have the temerity to live under the spot where a U.S. fighter plane drops its bombs.

Then there's good ol' Podhoretz Jr. Writing in the New York Post, Johnny Boy mourns the fact that Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 weren't deliberately wiped out by American troops during the initial invasion of Iraq.

I must say that something strikes me as especially obscene about these men, who are able to spend a few hours behind a microphone or a word processor calling for violence against civilians, and who then are able to live the high life, attending cocktail parties, going on expensive vacations, buying fancy homes, etc. I don't disparage them their wealth, but it just seems to me that when you make such evil statments, you ought at least to have the courage of your despicable convictions. These guys seem to be cheating.

At least a man like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness walked the walk. The Abu Ghraib prison guards, likewise, got down and dirty. They didn't just yammer on about how we need to get "tough"; they got tough, which is to say, they did the dirty work. Now they are paying the price, as Kurtz did, as have all thoughout history who have been caught with blood on their hands. Yet the O'Reillys and Boortzes and Limbaughs of the world strike me as wannabe Kurtzes, who are nevetheless eager to escape suffering Kurtz's consequences. They want to be rhetorical war criminals, and still live the lives of normal people. They want the bloodshed without the accompanying shell-shock and nightmares.

It's hard, in some ways, not to admire the actual war criminals more. They have the benefit of being true "lost, violent souls," while the radio blabbers are only "the hollow men, the stuffed men."

I cannot help but wonder if the actual war criminals may be closer to actual repentance, and thus to genuine salvation, than the smug, hollow men who populate the AM airwaves these days.

Go Daddy Go!!

2006-09-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

(By "Daddy" I mean "Holy Father")

Yes, I admire Benedict Ex Vee Eye greatly for taking a controversial stand for the truth regarding the uglier side of Islam. (For those who haven't heard, he quoted some 14th century philosopher who remarked that Muhammad's legacy included a tendency to spread faith by force-- aka "jihad"-- a tendency that B XVI condemned.)

Quite a refreshing change after John Paul 2's marked tendency to go soft on the pointing out the disagreeable elements of other faiths, all in the interest of fostering ecumenical diologue. (His kissing of a Koran at the behest of a foreign official was perhaps the nadir of his papacy.)

Of course, I'm not in favor of the neocon's "clash of civilizations" rhetoric, which sees fit to slam Islam at every turn en route to shilling for Israel, and wishes to draw America into total war with the Arab world. But I know Ratzi ain't a damn, dirty neocon, so his criticism of Islam isn't tainted by ulterior motives. In fact, I'll bet ol' Ratzo little knew the firestorm he would ignite with his words, which were measured and respectful.

I must admit, it's a little amusing that some Muslims get offended when someone implies that they have a legacy of intolerance... and then they react to his statement with acts of intolerance (burning the pope in effigy, firebombing churches, general ranting, raving, fit-throwing, screaming for apologies, etc.), thus proving his point.

My Latest At the Last Ditch

2006-09-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_loving_death.htm

So... The Clinton People Are Bitchin'...

2006-09-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

And I don't mean "bitchin'" in the surfer parlance, where it means the same thing as "really great." For one thing, I'm not a surfer dude, and I don't use surfer dude expressions. For another thing, I don't like that scuz Prez Clinton or his vile cronies, so I wouldn't use any word synonymous with "great" to desribe them.

No, I just mean that they're bitchin', as in complaining, about the new ABC 9-11 docudrama, which they say treats them unfairly. They say that it doesn't tell the truth. Well gee whiz, ain't payback a bitch? Make a habit of treating the truth with contempt, and see if it doesn't come back to bite you eventually.

This is how I hope the conversation between President Gropefondlerape and the ABC representatives went:

Clinton: But this stuff in your movie, it isn't true!
ABC: That depends on what your definition of "isn't" is, Mr. President.

That said, I really have no dog in this fight, if the fight is between the Clinton presidency's foreign policy and the Bush presidency's foreign policy. I don't know if the Clinton people are actually telling the truth (though it's hard to imagine, given the source) when they say the movie is unfairly biased against them. Obviously, Bush is a far more palatable person than Clinton, but I'm not sure he's been that much better of a president.

Clinton-hatred is highly understandable, but it ought not get one sidetracked. We should recognize that our culture is the real villain; the fact that a man like Clinton got easily elected-- twice-- points the finger at us, not him. No one forced him on us, and he didn't even force himselves on us (which is more than a lot of women can say). We chose him.

Looked at this way, it's almost easier to see the events of 9/11/01 as a kind of divine retribution, or at least a very forceful sort of divine chiding. No, I'm not saying that the people who died that day, or who lost loved ones, deserved what they got. But I'm not sure, in a deeper sense, that our country didn't deserve what it got. Too bad, five years later, that we don't seem to have learned our lesson.

Morbid Reflections

2006-09-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

Though I haven't seen the actual document, I am told that someone in Al Qaida or some such group has spelled out why he believes the cultural West is doomed to lose the so-called "War on Terror," why the West, in fact, is fated ultimately to be supplanted by fundamentalist Islam.

He writes, and I paraphrase, "You infidels of the West, you love life and fear death. We Muslims, however, do not fear death. We love it, and we embrace it. You are afraid of us killing you, but we aren't afraid of you killing us. Therefore, you will lose (in spite of your far superior weaponry) and we will win."

The guy, whoever he is, has a point. We in the West do love life, and fear death. It only seems natural to us. But is it natural? After all, death is "natural." It's part of our design; we were "made" to die. You could even say that we were born to die. Yet we can't make peace with this circumstance. We don't want to die, we want to live. This mindset affects us, even, or maybe even especially, if we are unselfish. We don't want our loved ones to die any more than we want ourselves to die-- in some cases, we want them to live more than we want ourselves to live.

Fundamentalist Muslims, on the other hand, don't think twice about their children being "martyred." Parents of suicide bombers celebrate wildly when their sons (and sometimes daughters) blow themselves to smithereens. Such a reaction is utterly foreign to us. No matter how much we console ourselves that a deceased loved one is "in a better place," more often than not we don't actually believe it. At the very least, we have grave doubts.

For the last few months, I find that I have been "much possessed by death," constantly seeing "the skull beneath the skin," as T.S. Eliot once wrote. Nothing dramatic has happened to provoke these morbid thoughts. But then is death itself really all that dramatic? It's just something that happens, everyday, everywhere, in many different ways. Death seems like an exotic thing to us, but in fact it is anything but exotic. It should be a very familiar thing. We should know it intimately. Yet somehow we are unable to comprehend it. Is this state of being the result of immersion in a hedonistic, affluent, secular culture? Somehow I think it is.

Somehow, we have to learn to become like the fundamentalist Muslims, only better. We have to be able to conceive of death as a thing not to be feared, in fact, as a thing to be embraced, even loved. At the same time, we must retain our appropriate horror towards murder and mayhem, which fundamentalist Muslims also appear to embrace and love, at least when they are the perpetrators.

I'm not sure this can be done. We are too weak-willed, too indulgent, and most importantly, too lacking in faith. The vultures are circling around us, we know it, and we know there's nothing we can do about it. We are only able to console ourselves with platitudes about a "better place," pious utterances we don't even actually believe. Good Lord, how wretched we have become!

Overheard On Talk Radio, Part Drei: The Case of the Piehole

2006-08-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

Forgive me for vulgarity (not for the first time, nor the last time), but I'm really f#cking sick of this "it's the 1930s all over again, and Saddam Hussein/Amendenijad or however you spell it/(fill in the blank) is Hitler" rhetoric. For one thing, talk of this kind highlights the general historical illiteracy and tendency to groupthink among contemporary Americans. Guess what, people: there were bad men in history before Hitler. There have been bad men since. Hitler was evil, but he had no monopoly on wickedness, tyranny, cruelty and depravity. And yes, some men have arguably been even worse than the excitable dictator with the strident voice, the puffy pants and the silly mustache. Stalin, for one (though admittedly he was handsomer, better dressed, and had a more elegant-looking mustache than that wild-eyed Austrian fellow), except that he was our ally, loved and trusted by Roosevelt during WW2, that bloody conflict now commonly viewed as a straightforward battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. In defeating Hitler, we ended Nazism as a political force, which was good, except for the fact that in so doing we aided the spread of Communism, which was bad-- very bad.

Last Friday, a caller to the Glenn Beck program wanted to take issue with the glorification of Winston Churchill that is an essential part of the typical template by which WW2 is viewed as a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, rather than a means by which one Evil (Nazism) was supplanted by another, perhaps greater one (Communism), through the help of powers that committed plenty of evil themselves (see the deliberate destruction of civilian populations in Germany in Japan by U.S. and British forces) in the supposed pursuit of an eventual good. These days we all "know" that Churchill was a great leader who recognized the danger of the Nazis before anyone else (unlike the hapless Neville Chamberlain of the mainstream account of 20th Century history) and whose stirring speeches helped the British public endure the ruthless shelling of the Luftwaffe in the early months of the war. We don't, of course, hear about the Churchill that presided over the terror bombing operations of the RAF (in which German women and children were slaughtered rather than English ones), or who caved to the sinister, smiling Georgian with the elegant mustache and (along with Roosevelt) sold Eastern Europe into Bolshevik slavery at the Yalta conference.

Well, it seems that some of the usual suspects (Bush, Lieberman, and other politicians whose hay is made with "war on terror/stay the course" appeals) are now invoking the spirit of Churchill, insisting that it's 1938 all over again, that Iran is Nazi Germany, that "Islamofascism" is the new.... well, fascism. "Churchill stood up to the bad guys, and so should we," they declare. Of course, standing up to Islamofascism in their account invariably seems to involve invading the Middle East, taking it over by force in order to save it from itself (and killing not a few civilians in the process), and imposing the precious system of democracy down their throats.

That said, I don't know if the caller to Beck's show had any of this in mind when he called to offer an alternative view on Winston Churchill. Instead, he seemed to want to argue that Churchill (in an earlier post in his political career while stationed in the Middle East) was instrumental in causing some chaos in that region, particuarly in creating nation-states like Iraq, which led to tribal friction between the various groups who were suddenly thrown together and forced to see each other as fellow citizens.

Or at least I think that's what the caller wanted to say. I'm not sure, because Beck cut him off almost instantly-- in fact, the caller met his demise the very moment that it became clear he was going to be critical of Churchill. He only managed to say, "Churchill's one of the reasons why the Middle East is so messed up..." before Beck angrily told him "shut your piehole!" and then moved on to the next caller.

Beck is generally one of the more unpretentious, unabrasive, self-effacing talk jockeys out there. Of course, he's in lockstep with the Rush-Hannity axis on most matters, but he takes himself far less seriously, at least most of the time. He'd rather have fun with callers, including flaky or contrary-minded ones, than abuse or insult them. This is probably a large reason for his success. Yet clearly, there is a dark underbelly of brutal, self-righteous censoriousness beneath Beck's usually affable, comedic demeanor. I have heard hints of it before (the most disturbing being the time when he cheered Racheal Corrie's murder by an Israeli bulldozer-driver a couple of years ago), but nothing so blatant as this.

One has to wonder why criticizing Churchill in any way makes one so unworthy of being part of the national conversation. Why must we shut our proverbial pieholes, Mr. Beck? Is this perhaps a tacit admission that you have nothing of substance to feed us?

Overheard on Talk Radio, Part Deux

2006-08-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

In my latest piece at THE LAST DITCH (see link below), I criticized Rush Limbaugh for cheering on the notion of deliberately bombing civilians in order to to win a war. I know Rush claims to be pro-life, so I took him to task, not only for the repugnacy of his views re: war, but for his inconsistency. How can you say it's okay to slaughter the innocent in some circumstances, but not in others?

Well, based on what I heard yesterday, I'm now not so sure Rush is even pro-life. So I guess he might be off the hook on the inconsistency charge. He might just be consistently morally repugnant.

Rush was talking about this new article making the rounds in a lot of places, regarding the so-called "fertility gap" between conservatives and liberals in America. Apparently conservatives are prone to having larger families, and thus propagating their views to more future citizens. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to have fewer children (as is usually the case with more secular-oreinted folk, and liberals do tend to be more secular in their beliefs than conservatives), thus the future of the propagation of their ideology is in doubt. (They needn't worry, of course; as long as they control the academy, the media, and the courts, they'll be able to enforce their preferences and stigmatize their enemies as racists, sexists, and homophobes, et al)

Interesting article, and a very real phenomeon, no doubt. Then Rush pointed out that the liberals are probably also having more abortions than conservatives, which doesn't help their overall fertility. Decent point, and reasonable hypothesis, considering liberals are more likely to subscribe to the apalling notiong that killing a child is A-okay, provided the child hasn't emerged from the birth canal yet.

Then Rush started having some fun, and things turned ghastly.
"Liberals are aborting themselves out of existence. Abortion is almost their birthright," he said. This was a chilling turn of phrase, and if he'd stated it in a sober tone that drew attention to both the irony and the tragedy of the situation, all would have been well. But this didn't happen. In fact, after making this statement, Rush began to chuckle uncontrollably. He didn't just find this state of affairs bitterly ironic; he found it funny. If you want a good laugh, apparently nothing beats the merciless destruction of babies, provided their mothers are blue-state liberals.

It got worse.
"Liberals are aborting themselves out of existence, " Rush repeated. "So maybe we conservatives shouldn't oppose abortion so much."

Yes, he was probably being tounge-in-cheek. And I'm not the reflexively-offended type. I understand the appeal of self-consciously tasteless humor.

But forgive me if I observe that the sort of person who properly understands abortion as one of the greatest evils of our time wouldn't make a joke about how it's a good thing for babies to be murdered today, provided that this means fewer Democrat voters 18 years from now. Forgive me if I surmise that Rush probably doesn't care that much about unborn children, except as a wedge issue to get out the red-state vote.

Overheard on Talk Radio, Part One

2006-08-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

William Bennett to Rich Lowry of National Review (paraphrase): "I suppose a case could be made that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq..."

Really-- a case to be made! I'm hearing similiarly grudging admissions in other unexpected places too. A few months ago, the notion that things were going badly in Iraq was dismissed, the perception chalked up to the media's relentless bias. "Why do they keep reporting all the bad things that are happening over there?" the talk radio loudmouth chickenhawks would whine.

Now a new "paradigm" (man, I hate that word-- I don't take it seriously; that's why I enclosed in in quotation marks) seems to be emerging. We seem to be working up to an admission-- among formerly pro-war people-- that things in Iraq really ARE bad, that it's not just a lie concocted by anti-American military-hating journalist hacks. It will be interesting to see where this all will lead. Perhaps to an actual troop withdrawal? One can only hope.

Myself, I've never been sympathetic to the "why is the media reporting these things all the time?" complaint. Maybe it's because I once worked as a journalist myself, albeit in a small-time, small-town venue. It was often the case, in my experience, that people who complained about "negative" stories were bigwigs (and bigwig lackeys, suck-ups, and PR men) who somehow felt that they ought to be exempt from any kind of criticism. Believe me, if seven marines are killed by an IED in Tikrit, it's news, and it ought to be reported. If a crowd of Shite pilgrims are killed by Sunni insurgents, it's news, and it ought to be reported. And if some American soldiers indulge in a massacre of Iraqi civilians, it's news, and it ought to be reported.

Let the journalists tell their stories. Hold their feet to the fire, of course; make sure that they tell the truth. Make sure they are fair, and challenge them when they aren't. But don't give them hell for doing their jobs, just because you'd rather hear nicer stories.

About the Name

2006-08-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hundreds, if not thousands of my loyal readers have approached me at the gym, on the street, at work and at home, all to ask me the question(s), "What's it all about, Nowicki? Why have you named your blogsite 'Dyspeptic Myopic'? What does it mean?"

Then, of course, they ask for my autograph, which I generously provide, free of charge. (Unlike home run champion Hank Aaron, who makes people pay for his mighty signature, or did at least back in 1989, when he came to my high school and spent the morning pontificating about his greatness as a baseball player and a human being before haughtily refusing to sign a fellow classmate's copy of THE SCARLET LETTER as we stood in line to shake his hand as part of a phony and contrived display of generosity on the part of Hank's handlers following his pompous speech.) The brainy, buxom women who make up my fan base are all crushed to learn that I am indeed happily married, just as I have written in my profile. I tell them to keep their heads held high, not to give up, that there's someone out there just right for them who's got at least half of my wit, charm, and winning personality, if not my good looks. But I digress. In fact, I've digressed a couple of times, but who's counting? Indeed, who's reading?

Actually, no one has asked about the name of this site, except my wife, and to be honest she didn't seem all THAT interested. Nevertheless, here's what it's all about:

"Dyspeptic" means something like "disgruntled." Dyspepsia is a condition that is characterized by a chronically upset stomach. A dyspeptic personality is someone who is cynical, suspicious, misanthropic.

"Myopic" is a condition of the eye-- I think it means something similar to "shortsighted," only more extreme. A myopic person is someone who gets too caught up in himself and his own struggles to see the much vaunted "big picture."

As a card-carrying pessimist, I have often observed that optimists become angry when their sunny expectations of life and the future are challenged. Hell hath no fury like an optimist scorned. If you are a pessimist, there must be something wrong with you, they assert. They assign you certain epithets, and in so doing declare that you needn't be taken seriously. "Dyspeptic" and "myopic" are two such epithets.

Well, there COULD be something wrong with me. My thoroughgoing pessimism about life, the future, civilization, humanity, and so forth could well be an outgrowth of my own inner problems. I might just be "projecting" my own demons on the world around me. I'm open to that possibility.

Then again, it MIGHT just be that I have a point, that my gloomy outlook isn't so much pessimistic as it is realistic. And it might be that you insufferable optimists out there-- who like to dismiss us unreconstructed pessimists as buffoonish curmudgeons-- are actually the ones who have deep-seated personal issues.

Then again, it could well be that everyone is f#cked up, and no one knows what the f*ck they're talking about. In which case, conversation is useless, and we should all just die. Even I am not willing to go that far.

No, I plan to continue to hold up my end of the conversation, out of some kind of faith that conversation is useful, and that through conversation, we can get somewhere better.

Thus, I write on, embracing the very dismissive appellations given to me by my enemies, and indeed using them as a rallying cry. Dyspeptic Myopic forever!!!

My Latest At THE LAST DITCH

2006-08-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_hate_radio.htm

2 V or not 2 V: That is the question

2006-08-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've officially been Roman Catholic for just four months now, but I've been "Catholic-minded" for a long time. It took me a while to make the final step Rome-ward. I didn't hesitate for any of the usual reasons. I didn't have a problem with the doctrine of transubstantiation, or with the elevated status of Mary, or any of the other bugaboos you often hear converts or would-be converts dwelling upon. Frankly, folks, those things are small potatoes. If you're already a Christian, you already base your faith on a miracle; you believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and that he rose from the dead. Hell, if you can buy into that, why is it so hard to believe that God could be actually present in the wafers and the wine the priest holds up at the altar? As far as Mary goes, the Church of course doesn't and never has considered her divine; she's simply a great, great person who's highly blessed in Heaven. Even papal infallibility is not such a big deal when one understands that the pope is really just a sinning schlub like the rest of us, and that actual ex cathedra pronouncements are exceedingly rare occurances.

And hey, I've always loved the saints. I've always been drawn to iconography, to statues, to candles, to vestments, to rituals, to "smells and bells," in short, to the whole Catholic mystique. I really don't understand wanting to do without such things. Why separate yourself from beauty, in order to immerse yourself in the stark plainness or even ugliness that characterizes much of the contemporary Protestant style of worship?

No, it was in fact the very state of the contemporary Catholic church itself in this post-Vatican 2 era that provided the biggest stumbling block to my conversion. I still can't stand many things about the typical novus ordo mass-- the hippy-dippy touchy-feely hymns, the hand-holding during the saying of the Our Father, the back-slappin' howdy-do-neighbor "sharing of the peace" moment, the ubiquitous "craftsy" church decorations (felt banners, etc.), the church buildings that look more like plush hotel lobbies than places of prayer, etc. etc. etc.

All of this crap, and worse, started after the Second Vatican Council was held in the early 60s. Since that time, priestly and religious vocations have dropped off severely, the "Lavender Mafia" of militant homosexual recruitment has sprung up in many seminaries, and heretical and heterodox concepts have gained momentum in many quarters, to such an extent that one recent pope (Paul VI) even mourned that "the smoke of Satan has entered the Church."

So is the Second Vatican Council to blame for the downward direction of the Church since the time of its inception, or was the Council itself a good thing, and does the problem simply stem from abuses or willful misinterpretations of the "spirit" of the Council? That is the question for all doctrinally orthodox, serious Catholics to ponder.

Myself, I'm not a scholar, so I can't answer definitively. But I will confess to an impatience with many of those in the "willful misinterpretation" school of thought. There is a certain glibness to many of these folk that grates and irritates. It's as though they can't see the full extent of the problem. Or else they admit that, yeah, the problem is bad... but it is in the process of being corrected. "Be not afraid," as JP2 said, and all that.

Sorry, but I'd have an easier time buying this optimistic view if you could show me where any ultra-liberal heretical group operating within the Church has received the excommunication treatment accorded to Lefebyre and the SSPX. And thanks, JP2 and company for making it "legal" to celebrate the Tridentine Mass again, but y'all must be aware that not all bishops are accomodating, and many are downright hostile to us traditionalist-minded folk. Thus, many of us are deprived of the opportunity to obtain the sacraments in a manner that we find revential, and we have to settle for novus ordo cheesiness every Sunday instead.

I like you Ratzi, but you have got some serious work to do, and not a lot of time to do it. Time to get cracking.

More Mel Thoughts

2006-08-07T07:31:00.000-07:00

1) Am I the only one paranoid enough to wonder if this whole incident could be a scheme cooked up to manufacture a controversy, in order to create anticipation for an upcoming movie? They say there is no such thing as bad publicity, after all. Gibson had been out of the public eye for a while following THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. His new movie, APOCALYPTO, is set to come out in December. I know that Barbara Walters-- who made a career out of being a celebrity kiss-ass-- has turned on Mel and said she's not going to see any more of his movies, but I think there's a good chance that more people will see APOCALYPTO than would have before after this whole "drunk driving Jew-baiting" thing plays itself out. (All right-- this is just an out there sort of theory; I don't really believe it myself; still, it would be wild if it turned out that Mad Max and his enemies in the Hollywood "Judocracy" were actually in cahoots all along.)

2) Will Gibson appear on Saturday Night Live in the fall and make fun of himself on national TV? If I were his agent, I'd recommend such a course of action. You know the ratings would be through the roof. Gibson could turn on the goofy, manic charm that was the trademark of some of the more comedic roles of his career, and Americans' hearts would melt. Even Jews would admire his chutzpah. It would be a real "win-win situation" (dontcha just love that expression?) And of course it would get even more people to see APOCALYPTO. In short, complete career rehabiliation would be achieved.

3) By the way, is Gibson still a hunk? I hardly ever hear him referred to as such anymore, but he seems to be holding up against the ravages of age pretty well to me. Still, I don't recall hearing Gibson being called "sexy" in the last three or four years-- in short, not since THE PASSION went into pre-production. Is this what going against the principalites and powers of the age does to a person? Are you stripped of even your sex appeal? Is this the threat they hang over our heads: "Oppose the Zeitgeist, and we'll declare you unsexy, even if you're Mel Gibson"?

4) I admired, and still admire Gibson greatly for going out on a limb to make THE PASSION, and to make it exactly as he wanted to make it (well, except for not giving the subtitle to the "his blood be on us and on our children" line-- his one artistic concession). I always admire anyone who says, "screw you, I'm gonna do it this way; to hell with conventional wisdom and political correctness, etc." I liked how, in his interview with Diane Sawyer, he stubbornly refused to diss his dad Hutton in any way, while implicilty rejecting some of Hutton's more fringe ideas. Now some of the smarmy schlubs and sycophants on certain Catholic blogs are clamoring for Mel to openly denounce his father, as the first step towards personal rehabilitation. It's sickening how a desire to make nice with the smelly little orthodoxies of our time can lead certain weak-minded people to demand that another person turn on his family. Pathetic. Nauseating.

On Mel

2006-08-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Let's be honest: if a Jewish movie star were arrested for driving drunk, and over the course of his arrest he launched into a tirade against the goyim, this wouldn't be a story. Nobody would care-- at least, nobody important.

Welcome to the 21st Century, where some people, and some prejudices, are more equal than others.

It's Official: I'm Disgusted With Talk Radio

2006-07-31T18:15:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. Stop the presses. Like anyone cares. Still, this is MY blog, so I'm gonna talk about it.

In the last few days, with the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah, a clamor seems to have arisen among some of the more despicable denizens of the talk radio scene, particularly in the wake of the numerous civilian deaths that have resulted from the IDF's bombing campaign in southern Lebanon. The rhetoric goes as follows: "hey--people die in wartime. It's inevitable. Let's not be so squeamish about it. In fact, let's go for it! (In this case, the 'let's' is referring to Israel, which most talk radio hosts and listeners now seem unable to distinguish from the United States; hence the 'us' in 'let's') Let's really take the fight to those miserable ragheads. Men, women, children, babies-- f*ck 'em! Make 'em taste our power! If we don't blast 'em good (the " 'em" being the said civilans-- civilians being unarmed men, women, children, and babies), they'll only think we're weak, and they'll feel emboldened to strike at us (yes, 'us') again!"

Of course, there are always hot-blooded chicken-hawks who like to rant in this manner. We shouldn't necessarily take it seriously. Not everyone who talks about bombing areas of the world off the map is inclined actually to do it, just like not everyone who favors legalized abortion would actually feel comfortable cutting a living child to pieces in his or her mother's womb. But one of the terrifying things about modern warfare is that it is largely impersonal. A fighter pilot doesn't see the lives he is snuffing out by dropping his bombs from high in the sky. Thus, the line between being naively sympathetic to an evil act and actually being complicit in the act becomes blurred.

In a way, the same can be said for many of the voices we now hear on the AM dial, both hosts and callers, who proclaim a disgust with the outcry against civilian deaths in some circles, and an eagerness to declare total war, not just against known terrorists, but also among the civilian populations of countries where terrorists are sheltered.

God help those who are egging on this murderous mindset. In an indirect but nevertheless real way, they may already have blood on their hands.

More later.

Eternal Nothingness: That Bad?

2006-07-27T09:27:00.001-07:00

If you are Christian, your faith teaches that after death, you will proceed to Final Judgment, through which process you will hopefully wind up in Heaven. To a materialist, any talk of an afterlife is a sham.

As a Christian and a Catholic, who is nevertheless extremely mindful of his sins, I do have a hope one day to dwell in Paradise, after perhaps a good century or so getting my ass kicked in Purgatory. (I have hope, but not foolish hope, and the doctrine of Purgatory makes a lot of sense to me, as it allows for our ultimate salvation but does not deny that sin has consequences-- lasting ones, even if they are not eternal ones.)

Yet as I haven't died yet, I can't know for sure what happens when I enter that "undiscovered country." Neither does anyone else who hasn't already died, which goes for most of us.

Most of the time, I find the notion of Eternal Nothingness to be depressing. But sometimes I reconsider, especially when I become aware of how many true sh*theads there are out there with whom I may have to share Heaven one day. People who claim an alliegance to the teachings of the Church of Christ, yet whose behavior with others is characterized by nothing resembling Christian charity, much less common decency. Sad to say, I seem to have come into contact with many such people in recent months. Now I don't claim to be perfect-- far from it; I'm not demanding that everyone who claims to be Christian has to be Mother f#ckin' Theresa or else he/she's a total sham. I couldn't hold such high standards without being a rank hypocrite. But there's imperfect and then there's pretty damn imperfect. There's flawed and then there's utterly insufferable. I know the difference.

Would Eternal Nothingness be so bad if it means not having to dwell in Paradise with the likes of... well, I'm not going to name names. It wouldn't be dignified. Fill in the blank yourself with your own names, ponder the question as it applies to you, and see what conclusions you draw.

Is Political Correctness Dead?

2006-07-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Of course not, silly. It's just getting started. It will, it will, rock us. Hate speech laws are all the rage in Europe and Canada, and we'd be daft to think that they won't eventually breach our borders as well. The current state of liberalism is such that it will brook no dissent from its own smelly little orthodoxies, all the while extolling itself as the essence of dissent. You can read all about it, and more, in my famous 2002 publication, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LIBERALISM: CHARACTER STUDY OF A POLITICAL MOVEMENT, still available on amazon.com.

Still, it's notable that the anti-p.c. movement seems to be in high gear, and gaining momentum all the time. Even among many blue-state folks, one senses, it's now hugely hip to flout the smelly little orthodoxies that are being forced down our throats, whether directly at the barrel of a gun through the decrees of the state, or through the more subtle, though no less diabolical, schemes of powerful opinion shapers in key posts, both public and private.

Many people, it seems--even many who may self-identify as liberals-- have had enough. They're tired of getting yelled at, shamed, or otherwise regarded as less than human if they accidentally offend someone in some protected caste, and so earn the wrath of the enforcers of proper discourse. This sense of fed-uppedness is on display in much of the popular comedy of the last decade. Beginning, perhaps, with SOUTH PARK in the mid-90s, un-p.c. humor is just about everywhere in the movies and TV now. It can be observed with astounding regularity. To just take a couple of examples from recent memory: In YOU, ME, AND DUPREE, a recent comedy flick, one character jokingly calls another a "homo," and remains a sympathetic character. In the hugely popular PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN, Jack Sparrow is kept prisoner by a fiercely barbaric native cannibal tribe-- a far cry from the politically correct vision of noble savages a la DANCES WITH WOLVES or POCOHONTAS. Is it just me, or would we never have seen such material ten or fifteen years ago?

Likewise, there are a bunch of comedians today, the essence of whose comedy seems to be to make shocking, insensitive comments about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. The latest, or one of the latest, is Sarah Silverman, whose onstage persona is the embodiment of a cute Jewish American Princess, who happens to have an inexplicable tendency to mock blacks (even the sainted "Reverend Doctor" King isn't spared-- she calls him Martin Loser King), Asians, Hispanics, the handicapped, homosexuals, and so forth. Her delivery is extremely deadpan, her voice somewhat abrasively nasal, yet innocent-sounding, and she speaks in the tone of a uptown gal who's just been on a killer shopping spree, making the actual content of her material all the more jarring. She'll rattle off lines like "I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl," and "Actually, the best time to get pregnant is when you're a black teenager"casually, as she might talk about finding a great pair of shoes at the mall.

Then there are the songs, featured in her concert movie JESUS IS MAGIC, directed by Liam Lynch, whom some of us may know as Olly on the criminally underrated and underwatched SIFL AND OLLY show from the late 90s. Miss Silverman serenades a group of old folks with a tune whose chorous goes, "You're gonna die soon, you're gonna die soon, you're dying!" Later, in a love song filled with felicitious metaphors, she croons, "I love you more than bears love honey/ I love you more than Jews love money... I love you more than Gary Busey/ I love you more than dykes love pyussy."

Granted, this sort of material isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like it, that doesn't make you a humorless p.c. thug/would-be censor. Still, even those who prefer cleaner material have to take notice that the growing phenomenon of reactionary humor signals something significant for our age. I would even venture to say that it signals something healthy about the human spirit. I'm not saying that Sarah Silverman, or any of her ilk, are societal heroes; rather, they're canny entertainers, who know that some people are tired of hearing the same old tired lines about "celebrating diversity" from the same powers-that-be who push for utter ideological uniformity and severly punish dissent.

It's official: the critics have turned on M. Night Shamalyan

2006-07-22T14:34:00.000-07:00

I hadn't expected to see Shamalyan's new flick THE LADY IN THE WATER get so thoroughly scholacked, drubbed, pummelled, smothered, and bitch-slapped by critics, as has turned out to be the case. I thought reaction would at least be around 40-50 percent positive, seeing as how these same critics pretty much universally jizzed in their jeans over THE SIXTH SENSE a mere seven years ago. Has that much changed since then? Has this guy realy worn out its welcome to such an extent? Apparently so; according to rottentomatoes.com, Shama-lama's approval numbers are currently much lower than the President's.

I liked THE SIXTH SENSE myself, but my favorite M. Night joint is by far THE VILLAGE, which you may have noticed is one of the movies listed in "favorite movie" section of my profile. I thought, and still think, that it is absolutely one of the more daring, provocative films of our day, both artistically and politcally/philosophically. Think about it: has anyone else bothered to make a group of white separartists seem sympathetic and compelling? I doubt a white writer/director would have gotten away with it...
See www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_village.htm (written in August 2004) for details.

LADY IN THE WATER is probably MNS's weakest effort yet, but it's still a pretty good movie. As with THE VILLAGE, LADY is part fantasy, part implicit social critique. Both movies make an issue out of how we as a culture seem to have lost our way. I enjoy Shammy's open hostility to post-modern smirking reductionism, whereby everything supernatural or miraculous that is claimed to have happened is viewed with bland forebearance by sophisticates, as a mere "story" with no ultimate value as truth. In an aside, one minor character in the movie expresses vehement opposition to the idea that a miracle has any value if it is "just a story" and not factual.

Shammo's got some balls too, as can be seen in a couple of details of his latest film. He actually appears as a character who has written a book about how our cultural problems can be fixed, one that, it is prophesied, will eventually help spur great change for the better in the near future. Since MNS is already apparently regarded by many as something of an egomaniac, making himself the genius whose ideas will save mankind is...well, ballsy. I like it. I also like that he has one of his characters be a cynical and ornery film critic, who thinks he's seen it all and who expresses great contempt for the supposed significance of unfolding events... all before dying a horrible death onscreen. It's as if the Sham Man is looking at his enemies (the film critics) and declaring, "guess what guys, I'm the Messiah, and you... well, you're nothing but a scrunt snack!"

I Dump on Sean Hannity

2006-07-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not a Rush Limbaugh enthusiast, but I understand the guy's appeal. He's smart, he's funny, he can be satirically incisive. Of course, he can be unpleasant, unfair, and annoying, and it's safe to say that he's much more a hack for Republicans than a true conservative. Still, as long as his message is taken with a grain or two or three of salt, Rush is-- I admit-- an entertaining and engaging radio personality.

Now somebody please tell me: how in the world has Sean Hannity become the second most popular radio talk show host in America? What, precisely, does Sean bring to the proverbial table? The dude's got no talent. He's not funny. He's not insightful. He's got no amusing schtick or comedic bits in his arsenal, like Rush does. He's got nothing in his arsenal, in fact. He has nothing original or imaginative to offer. He's not even a good interviewer.

Now I know it's possible for some no-talent host types to be endearing, in their own sweet, friendly, unthreatening way: Regis Philbin comes to mind, as well as perhaps Ed Sullivan. But Hannity isn't even likable. From his whiny voice to his unctuous tone with his frequent guests, the Hann-man fairly well radiates smarm. When talking to a Republican or Likud Party member, he is worshipful and sycophantic to the point of inducing nausea; when talking to someone who is critical of Bush or the military in any way, he immediately assumes a petulantly hostile air and can only splutter out lame, question-begging ad-hominem potshots like, "Tell me sir, why,why do you hate your country so much? Answer the question sir... sir, answer the question!!"

Interestingly, it's hard to find Sean totally odious, because one gets the impression than somewhere deep down he knows he's in over his head, that he's completely aware of his incompetency, and that the bravado he summons is little more than a defense mechanism, masking deep-seated insecurity. Still, thousands if not millions of Americans worship Hannity, and don't seem in the least aware that he's a total boob. I hope somebody out there gets it, 'cuz I sure don't.

Three Definitions of Nice-- A Mormon Odyssey

2006-07-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

I don't believe I have a cruel or mean bone in my body, but I am not, most of the time, what you would call a "nice" person. I do have my "nice" moments; I can be polite, gracious, respectful, and sympathetic, if I feel like it. Often, I think I come across as fairly aloof, and occasionally a little ornery, albeit in a quiet, unassuming sort of way.

There is a kind of "niceness" that can also be called "aggressive friendliness." This type of guy (it is usually a guy) will walk right up to you with a hearty greeting and will hold out his hand for you to shake. You didn't ask to meet him, but he wants to introduce himself to you. This sort of "nice" person is usually being nice as a means to some kind of end. He wants to sell you something, or perhaps tell you about Jesus. He may mean well, he may not be evil or cruel or mean, but nevertheless, I'll confess I really can't abide this sort. I generally like to be left alone. If you want to ask me something, that's fine, but don't come on too strong, please. Don't act all familiar, like we're good friends or something. Don't take this personally, but I'm not interested in shaking your hand, and whatever you're selling, I'm not buying. Now go away. Please. Before I call the cops.

The second kind of "niceness" can be defined as "prone to bland agreeability." This is the definition of "nice" that we most commonly hear about. This sort of guy or girl (it can be male or female) will let you borrow his can opener or her makeup, in a pinch, and won't hold it against you if you forget to give said item back to him/her for a few days. They wave to you and make conversation, but aren't pushy or controlling, like the first type of "nice" person discussed here. "Nice" people of this second category don't behave as they do out of great generosity of spirit, but because it's the path of least resistance. They are pleasant out of sheer custom. Which isn't to say they can't really like you or aren't capable of great acts of heroism when the chips are down. It's just to say that if they show their heroic true colors during a time of crisis, if they run into a burning house to save a litter of puppies or leap into the road to save an old lady from being hit by a bus, this behavior is in no way an outgrowth of their general demeanor of niceness, which does not incline them to face danger head on in a selfless spirit. It's not that theyr'e crassly self-interested either, of course. It's just a habit. It doesn't make waves. Generally speaking, it's the best way of dealing with others.

The third type of "niceness" is the rarest type. The quality that it almost seems incongruous to call "nice," since it borders on the something more profound. The type of nice person I speak of here is someone who is not only pleasant, but possessed of a serenity of spirit that is practically seductive. Something about this type of person makes you WANT to share yourself with them. You don't just find them passively aimiable, as with the second type; you don't just enjoy their company; you crave it. You feel that being around them will help you to become more like them, which in turn will bring you greater happiness. It is as though you sense something savoring of the sweet delights of Heaven in their midst.

What does it mean that the type of people who most often have this quality about them today are Latter-Day Saints, i.e. Mormons? Is this serenity of spirit a by-product of having been raised in a culture so different from that of mainstream America? A practically "theocratic," certainly "theocentric" culture, that is, in which there is greater faith in the divine, where doubt does not so often protrude its ugly head, where people feel assured of a blessed hereafter, where wholesome values are reinforced, not just by one's parents, but by one's friends, one's neighbors, one's teachers, one's elected officials? Must one be immersed in such a blessedly heterodox culture before one can obtain such peace of mind and soul?

In case anyone is reading, and in case you are reading closely enough to wonder-- no, I'm not interested in becoming a Mormon. I find their ideas absurd, their theology a mess. Joseph Smith was without a doubt a brilliant con man, and Brigham Young a dour tyrant. The history of the Mormon church is riddled with unsavory incidents, and the church leaders' attitudes towards these events is highly disengenous, to say the least. Traditional, orthodoxy Christianity has it all over Mormonism in every way-- theologically, intellectually, and logically. Still... why do today's Mormons seem to have so many spiritual gifts that we Christians lack? Where is there such joy emanating from their midst, such robust hope, such fervant charity? Such profound and thoroughgoing... niceness?

To indulge in useless cultural commentary for a moment...

2006-07-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

I don't like politics. I especially don't like contemporary American politics. I tire exceedingly of the "culture war." Not that I entertain any silly conviction that "deep down we're all the same," and that the red-state/blue-state paradigm is just a mirage, or anything like that. I know that "red state" people and "blue state" people are fundamentally different, and I much prefer the company and the convictions of the former, although I'm also willing to admit that when it comes to appreciation of the arts, the blues have generally got it all over the reds. A perfect state for me would combine the morals of the reds with the aesthetics of the blues. But a perfect state, being Utopia, does not exist-- the very definition of Utopia being "nowhere."

I don't like the culture war because it gives me a headache. It's useless trying to argue or debate with people who don't share your underlying convictions. I have no interest in debates on issues like abortion, for example. Either you believe that innocent human life should be protected, or you don't. If you don't, then I think what you need is an awakening of conscience, not an argument. Don't even bother trying to tell me that you think abortion doesn't mean killing a human life. If an unborn child isn't human, what is it? If it isn't a life, what is it? If you believe it's permissible to kill a human life at some point after it is conceived, then why does permissiblity to kill stop once the life exits the birth canal? If you believe in abortion, then you believe the strong have free reign to kill the weak if it suits them to do so. There is only a difference in degree, not in kind, between you and an apologist for genocide. That said, I'm not calling you a genocidalist monster. I only think you've been brainwashed by the Zeitgeist. That doesn't make you a bad person, necessarily. Again, what you need (I think) is to have your mind opened, your conscience quickened, and your heart softened. But I don't know how to do any of those things. And I'm really not interested in trying. You'll come around, or you won't. It's got nothing to do with me. If you're "pro-choice," I don't want to argue with you. I don't want to talk about it with you. I should pray for you, but to be honest, I don't especially feel like doing that either. If God wants to make you see the light, he'll make you see the light. If for his own inscrutable reasons he doesn't want you to see the light, then believe me, you won't. In my experience and observation, people don't change their underlying convictions, even if presented with overwhelming evidence contradicting their convictions. It's easier to assimilate than to accomodate, as my high school Psychology teacher once said.

The main reason I hope the Republicans stay in control is because I want to see Roe V Wade overturned. It's all about judges, judges, judges. Not that I am terribly optimistic about the GOP coming through on this matter. I don't think they care terribly much about abortion; they just want it as an issue on which to run. It's really not in their interest to see that Roe V Wade gets overturned, because it that happens, the abortion issue effectively gets taken away from them. You think they want that? Hell no. Still, the Repugs are better than the Dumpocrats, the latter being almost totally in the service of Planned Parenthood and NARAL and other advocates of baby slaughter. The Repugs at least have to PRETEND to care about ending legalized abortion, and this means they'll sometimes take a half- or quarter-step in the right direction by appointing a solid, constitutionalist-oriented, anti-activist judge to some high court somewhere. The Dumpos can only be counted on to take us further down the slippery slope of the Culture of Death, and frankly we're far enough down that slope already that they can hardly do any more damage than has already been done. Like the old lady in that old commercial, we've fallen, and we can't get up; like her, our body politic is in a corrupted, decayed state and will probably soon die.

So I am still a proponent of the GOP as the lesser of two evils. But sometimes, every once in a while, I become so cross with the neocon/"nuke the towelheads"/"invade the world to save it (and Israel)" faction of the Repugs-- the faction all but running the current White House-- that I wonder if a Dumpocrat victory might not also have its advantages. Never do I feel more this way than when I hear some pipsqueak talk radio blatherer agitating for a new Middle Eastern war (as if our hands weren't already full with the current one)-- a war in which neither he nor anyone he is close to will have to kill or die, so far as I can tell. I really don't understand how a conservative with eyes wide open to the ravages of our culture (the sexual revolution, the celebration of perversion, the destruction of innocence, etc.) can want to take steps to ensure that culture's dominance over traditionalist cultures (like those of the Middle East) who actually believe in things like chastity, the family, and God. With the "godless" (TM Ann Coulter) Democrats in charge, at least the mask would be torn off, and maybe some conservatives would see that the modern-day American empire they support for what it is, a modern day Gomorrah with expansive tendencies, lurching towards world domination.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN

2006-07-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've recently completed my third book, and I feel close to no sense of accomplishment. The reason being: I write that I might be read, and I have a strong impression that my third book, like my first (unpublished) and second (self-published), will go largely unread by anyone. Why should that bum me out to such an extent? Is not one's art an end in itself for the true artist? Does art not exist of its own accord, regardless of whether or not it is recognized as such? In answer to the last two questions, yes and yes. Still, as I grow older I find that I am more interested than ever in not just EXPRESSING, but also in COMMUNICATING my ideas. And I find it increasingly difficult to set out to work on anything without some indication that it will actually have an audience.
Recently, I published an article in NEW OXFORD REVIEW on the subject of the abortion holocaust in America. I felt somewhat gratified, but not elated. Ten years ago-- hell, five years ago, I would have felt thrilled to see my name in print of a (somewhat) major Catholic news/opinion magazine; I would have been bouncing off the walls to know that my stuff was being printed (even if in edited form), on something other than my own computer paper. Likewise, when Nick Strakon, editor of the online publication THE LAST DITCH, let me on board as a regular contributor in late 2003, my gratification was heartfelt, but relatively mild compared to how I would have reacted had this occured when I was still in my twenties. Unlike when I was a younger man, today I find myself seeing these accomplishments are relatviely minor. Yes, people now read my stuff (people other the small group of friends who read my stuff before, mostly out of a sense of obligation), but what does it all amount to? I find myself tiring of writing about social/cultural/political issues. Polemical columnists, like my personal favorites, Joe Sobran, and (of course, as I am a red-blooded American male who likes leggy blondes and enjoys seeing smug, insufferable leftists get rhetorically stomped and body-slammed) the now ubiquitious Ann Coulter, can be extremely astute and insightful in their commentary, and well worth reading, to a certain degree. Most of what I have written, at least in my first two books and in my articles in THE LAST DITCH, has been along the same lines: concerning hot-button issues: the culture war and all that. But frankly I'm growing weary of this type of writing. Today, I find I want to write something that is both more accessible and more profound than my typical fare. The only thing is, I have no clue at the moment what this new kind of writing really is.
As a result, I find myself in a huge creative funk. I simply can't get excited about writing anything, and as I result I can't write anything. I'm not the sort of person, or writer, who does things very well when he's not excited about doing them. I've NEVER been that sort of person. At the same time, I am close to positive that the reason I was put here was to write. If I'm not writing, I feel like I'm just wasting my life. (Of course I know that there are other important aspects to life besides fulfilling one's calling, particularly when one is a husband and a father, as I am; I don't mean the previous statement to come across too categorical or grandiose.)
Anyhow, as a result of this current state, I have decided to start keeping a blog. I don't know if every entry I make will be as starkly autobiographical as this one-- for my sake, and for the sake of any of my hypothetical readers, I hope not. A blog is not exactly a diary, and I could never keep a diary because I never saw the point of writing stuff that no one else but yourself is meant to read. To be sure, what I write here will be filtered to some extent-- no exposing the depths of my soul or anything tiresome like that. I have my sense of dignity, thank you very much.
Well, we'll see where this goes. To anyone reading, welcome aboard. I don't think you can respond unless you have your own blog, but if you are interested in getting your own blog, it seems quite easy to do. (I found it easy, and I am totally computer-illiterate.) Just go to www.blogspot.com and follow the directions. It's free! I heartily welcome both the responders (if there prove to be any) and the lurkers.

2006-07-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

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