A Message From Mayor Tommy Shanks

Otherwise known as Stephen Harper.

Seriously, has there ever been a less avuncular political candidate?

You know, I do believe I’m just about sick of ol’ Steve promoting himself as an expert in fields he has no expertise in. These blue-sky ads about how the Canadian electorate should think about climate change and gas-guzzling, or about how “soft on crime doesn’t work” (at last, the answer to it all, finally revealed!), or about how the Parliament he played his puerile games with “wasn’t functioning”…

Can you feel the contempt for your intelligence, Canada?

I’ve been watching de facto election ads for months. I’ve been listening to this guy LIE about shit — and lie so badly, so transparently! — for what seems like a fucking eternity. I’ve never seen a politician who shed such a reek of entitlement everywhere he goes…and I remember Trudeau. What’s with all this weird social engineering crap? I mean I guess we all know the guy’s embraced American-style politics, but can he not stop short of copping a feel off of them? The smugness in this guy’s face, the horror of it is that it’s so easily interpreted, you know? It’s so recognizable.

He thinks we’re sheep.

He thinks we’re sheep!

Stuffed sheep, to be precise. Any minute now he’s gonna throw a milk bone at us. Throw it right at our faces.

Welcome to Melonville. Christ, talk about a wrong turn.

Time to back up off of this direction, I think.

The Techno-Hubrists

Recently, Warren Ellis — a writer I quite like — published an amusing little rant that might as well have been titled “Why We Should Fuck Up Mars”. In it, he proposed just doing whatever to Mars that would be necessary to terraform it: throw the kitchen sink at it. Nukes, everything. Go nuts.

And, I confess I don’t know why anyone took this to be any kind of bold political statement: outside of Kim Stanley Robinson novels, is there really anyone crying out against would-be Martian strip-miners and condo developers?

But it doesn’t matter. As stimulating a writer as Warren Ellis is (and he is), one thing is perfectly clear: he is not a planetologist. If he were, he would have a better sense of proportion about things. For example: planets are BIG. They are enormously, possibly unfathomably, complex. We don’t even know how our own works. We can’t even terraform the Earth. We can’t even terraform the Sahara Desert. We don’t even understand the Moon, yet. So, terraform Mars?

For heaven’s sake…how?

It’s a perfectly fine science-fictional idea, it’s just not real. Which is okay, as it happens: I am not going to get pissy with Warren just because he said something that wasn’t real. For one thing, I don’t care if he did. For another, I say stuff like that all the time, myself. For example, I frequently drop vacant and obfuscatory lines about “Earthlike conditions”, even though I know perfectly well that there is really no such thing…

But there’s something instructive here.

Let’s consider that favourite of latter-day SF devices, the humble space elevator. Made from exotic materials, it rises at least several miles into the atmosphere in any fictional form it takes. This where ripping SF yarns begin, these days: on the space elevator. We are used to considering it plausible.

But it isn’t.

Consider the capital involved — consider the political wrangling that would be involved — in creating a building ten miles high made out of solid diamond. Of course that is not actually what it would take to build a space elevator, but I figure it’s a pretty good ballpark. So…possible?

Well, yesss…

So long as you can get yourself a decent World Government first, preferably one ruled by a benevolent Science Council all wearing different funny hats, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be simply a matter of engineering.

(I mean, how else could you possibly pay for the thing? Who would ever let you build it? Who would ever let you complete it?)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pessimist. But this is, as I’ve said before, one of the peculiarities of science fiction: it skips steps. Its initial conditions are never the initial conditions that obtain in the real world. Indeed, they cannot be: after all, we’re always finding out that what we thought the “real world” was like ten minutes ago is completely wrong, aren’t we?

And, yes, I’d love to see the space elevator. I hope, at minimum, that I can live in a world where it isn’t simply insane to imagine it as something that could be built, and used…and I do think this is that world. But, it’s a big world, and I could be wrong; and at the present time going to Mars in shiny sexy ships and lobbing nukes at it for no good reason actually seems more likely, than that it will ever be built.

However this is not my point.

My point is about science, not science fiction. I’m only talking about science fiction because it happens to be a very good way to talk about science, and illustrate things about science. So forget Arthur C. Clarke and Kim Stanley Robinson, and even Isaac Asimov too; because there’s a different kind of science fiction being written out there, now. And I don’t know if Warren’s a part of it or not. He may be. I really don’t know. He probably isn’t.

But, he could be.

…So return with me, if you would, to those halcyon days of an hour and a half ago, when the world seemed so fresh and new, and full of boundless possibilities! Let’s regard me sitting at my computer reading something, and shaking my head in disgust. A study performed, that’s revealed Scott McLeod was right, and human beings really do see themselves in car headlights. Okay, so great! We all knew that anyway. Now what’s the upshot, eggheads?

The upshot is, exploiting that tendency could give advertisers a whole new way to sell cars.

And oh my God…is this what we do it for?

Is this the knowledge we’ve sought for so long?

Hey, don’t be too hasty, maybe it is: a few years ago I remember howling with a mixture of rage and amusement at an article on “songwriting software”. This stuff, you see, helps analyze songs to see if they will be popular. A whole new way to break into the music business: because even if the Artists dude thinks your band sucks, if you can show him that the numbers roll the right way you may just land a contract in any case. And record companies even at their best can’t help but be slightly about hedging bets, you know…

So, they use it.

So, some people write by it, too.

And what’s wrong with that? Rare indeed is the musician who’s not at all interested in having at least a little bit of commercial appeal — and shame on you if you think otherwise — so what’s the difference between feeling your way in the studio and arguing with your manager, or going to school to study music theory, and actually going out to get a genuine for-real metric of your commercial appeal? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?

The damnedest part about it, is that it is the same thing. It is exactly the same thing.

Meaning: it’s completely absurd. Because everybody cares about money, but there are a lot of ways to make money, and — trust me — generally speaking, music ain’t one of them. Sure, records may move on the back of this software, but that doesn’t mean it “works” — as a vehicle made to carry a new type of collusion among players in the marketplace, the metric actually isn’t a metric of anything, except how orderly the money-flows would be if no one ever did have to hedge their bets. If what people liked last week, in other words, decomposed smoothly and with minimal uncertainty into what they like this week.

Of course that this doesn’t happen is the reason companies hedge their bets in the first place. So not only doesn’t the program work — and it ought to be laughably obvious that it doesn’t — but it misses the whole point of what music is for, and why and how it gets made. Not to mention, why and how it gets listened to. Making music under the guidance of a statistical formula is as pointless as…as…as playing against a computer in chess, which is the silliest thing I can think of off the top of my head. Chess, after all, is a game. Chess is played between human beings. That is the purpose of chess, and there’s no other. I might beat you, or you might beat me…but if two chess computers play each other in the forest, and a tree falls on them, it’s probably not even a stalemate, it’s just a bunch of electrons moving around inside aluminum casings. As science, it may be worth something (probably is, in fact). But as chess, it’s meaningless.

Key distinction.

Let’s try to hold onto it. Because though way back when I did talk about how we only get our mass-delivered science through two channels, the journalistic channel and the public-policy channel, it turns out that I’m missing another axis on this graph: there are two other ways we get the vast preponderance of our science-updates in this culture, and one way is through fiction, but the other way is through aspiration…which, I will argue, is the new fiction of our times. Aspiration is the thing that leads us to believe that we can have the things of fiction out in the world, and it’s very persuasive in part because we have gotten a lot of those things…but aspiration also leads on to the uncritical acceptance of deeply unscientific viewpoints as already-historical truths. Build self-replicating nanobots, reverse-engineer human consciousness, bomb Mars into a more favourable climate from orbit, let Wikipedia and the Internet effortlessly overturn the injustice of the world…if you listened to the New SF, you would already believe in these things, basically because the New SF sells simplicity in a world of ever-more complexified understanding, which is to say simplicity that has already been achieved. But this is about as dead wrong as you can get, when you’re trying to absorb what’s going on in the world of theory and discovery. Because it isn’t a technological singularity that’s coming, you see: that’s just fiction’s typical game, flipping the veil over its head, inverting relations to expose their true nature. What’s coming is a heaving quantum sea of interreactivity in our observed natural phenomena. All our observed natural phenomena. We will not get a technological singularity: because what we think we know about how the universe works is being done away with at far too great a speed, that mountain is eroding away under our feet even as we struggle to climb it. Things we have always known are disappearing faster than popular breeds of nineteenth-century cattle: we don’t know them anymore. We’re on the cusp; the cusp of the demise of a future in which we can just keep on slapping up our old disproven ideas against the universe and expect them to do anything for us, and a new world in which everybody is going to have to work a little bit harder to figure out what is what, and where and why. We are working off very few schema less than three hundred years old, at this point, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re all crashing around our ears, we should be expecting it. Because it’s just not going to be about what we thought it was going to be about. Things. Are. Fucking. Changing.

Surprisingly, the old fiction’s pretty okay with that: as it turns out, change is vital to stories, and especially this sort of change is vital to stories that are all about flipping science’s veil over, to show the face underneath. But this kind of change is deadly to aspiration, because it makes it hopelessly irrelevant…am I the only one who detects some truly terrified backing-and-filling in the notion that human beings seeing faces in cars is all about the cars? That’s some fiction, indeed: that one day soon there will come a glorious Golden Age in which everybody will at last be perfectly content with their car’s “face”. Thank God for science, hip hip hurrah! I for one have never felt so free, have you?

That’s the future this New SF imagines. Not that it isn’t or has never been a future imagined by the older fiction it’s attempting to supplant, either, but there’s a crucial difference — which is that the New Fiction is not at all interested in flipping the veil to show the face. Because it is far more optimistic than the old fiction is — indeed, it is far more optimistic than any fiction should probably ever wish to be. And the John W. Campbell Award for this year once again goes to those nabobs of the noosphere over at Wired magazine…!

Holy Jesus, how long ago was that all?

It’s not just gee-whizzery. Gee-whizzery is great stuff. But the idea that science will make a conceptually-simpler world somehow, in vague accordance with Moore’s Law or something, is — to put it kindly — garbage. There will be no greater technological power to straightforwardly “do” shit that we want to do; obstacles will not be ever-more miraculously removed from our current path so we can travel it with fewer interruptions; there will be no more assertions that all physics is really a subset of biology, and all biology a subset of economics…those days are gone, man. That future no longer squares with the experimental findings. And that’s what the Old SF has always been about, actually — so it’s no wonder it can move with the times. But the New SF can’t move with the times, so it’s trying to stop them.

Or at least, control them.

But control is an illusion.

Here’s the thing: the tendency is there in the Old SF too, sort of. What are all the stories of spaceships and space stations and rayguns and hyperspace drives and force-shields and telepathy and aliens, except an effort to give shape to the imagination of the future? In science fiction this was always a technical imagination that asserted itself — and there’s a lot of literature that imagines the future, actually, but SF is a creature so marvellous attuned to its times that its technical structuring of future-imagining became the dominant one. “Future” in the popular mind came to mean, at the very least, big motors and lots of metal. But underneath that, often, something else too: the naked face. The cold equations. The locked room.

In my day, though (oh, those halcyon days of three hours ago! I was so innocent then!), it got a little less educational (“why, in such a “jet” aeroplane a man could cross the Atlantic in a matter of hours!”), and a little more dogmatic (“no, no, you idiot…this is the future, that other shit’s just childish fantasy!“). When I was young, the world was full of SF fans (and writers) like that. They wanted to live on the Moon. They wanted to fly to the stars. They wanted a fusion reactor to run their dishwasher. So they tried to impress on the world that if you were spending money and time and effort and thought on a future that wasn’t that, then you were some kind of crank.

And, was this pretty much fine? Well, I guess so. Everybody’s gotta have an opinion, after all. And for the most part that all worked; that we did get that future maybe was because of that subtle imaginative control. The Man tried to shut us down, but we did get all that! Hip, hip…!

But it’s different now. Those techno-utopians may have been mostly right, but they’re also mostly gone, and I think they took most of the last of their times with them. And what’s the regulated future made of now? Nanobots and uploadable consciousness. Technological muscle-flexing like a magic spell, and all you gotta do is string the right words together in the right order. Computronium. Singularity. Magic. Transcendence.

It’s really just a fancy way of saying “selling more cars”. “This will continue endlessly, as efficiency rises to unity.” It’s what the Old SF mostly set itself in opposition to.

But the New SF, the monocultural one they spray with Round-Up — SF 2.0 — loves it. Of course SF 2.0 is bound to die a miserable lonely death — since death is what it so obviously fears above all else! — tell me I don’t have to draw you a map of that Singularity stuff, people! — as its goals gradually just plain cease to match up with scientific and social analysis. Good! It’s overstayed its welcome anyway. But that’s not my point either.

Ah, the point. Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up spouting off ill-formed blogifestos. Okay, here’s the point:

Ceci n’est pas un post.

And oh, the cleverness of me. Can’t believe it took almost two years to polish that trick off.

I guess I was just waiting for an appropriate subject to come along.

Now that was a little science fiction for you, Bloggers!

How does it taste? Hopefully not half-bad.

The Only Good Utopia Is A Dead Utopia

Hey, Bloggers. Anyone up for a long boring babble about nothing in particular? Some spoilers ahead.

A few years ago I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County Trilogy…which in case you’re unfamiliar with it is three novels about Orange County, each as it would be in a different type of “utopian” near future. The final volume, Pacific Edge, is probably both the least satisfying, and the least convincing: depicting a Green future full of co-ops and civic virtue, it seems more like Mars than California, and despite its protagonist’s wriggling around somewhat in the confines of utopia’s straitjacket, it doesn’t sizzle quite as much as the volume immediately preceding it, The Gold Coast, which depicts a near-future technological “utopia” much like our own world if you just keep tracing out the lines to where they seem to be leading circa 1988 or something. No worries about trying to see the conflicts as satisfying here: it’s recognizably our own world, just with a little extra SF flava.

And then finally, there’s the first volume: The Wild Shore.

This one’s my favourite, probably because if you return to it after reading the trilogy out to its conclusion, you’re left with a strange thought in mind: that the closest thing we’ll likely ever have to a functioning social utopia may be an ad hoc subsistence-level quasi-communism that probably doesn’t top out at fifty members — if they can really even be called “members” — where everybody’s working so hard just to lay in food for the winter that social organizations are basically completely accidental, even if they’re sometimes fortunate. Utopia as the state of being bombed back to the Stone Age; but you always know that’s what’s happened to you, and that’s what makes the situation messed-up enough to be called a utopia in the first place, even if it’s got sneer quotes around it. Just as The Gold Coast very cleverly presents the view that, hey, when viewed in any type of decent historical perspective this world is a utopian one — I mean just look at all our cool stuff! — but nevertheless, Et In Arcadia Ego, you know? Well, but the “Arcadia” part of that is as important as the “Ego”, as important even as the overwhelming “Et In”, and so don’t let me get too hasty with the sneer quotes anyway…!

Because they may be all we have…

Sorry, getting tangled…

So what was I saying? Oh, yes: just as The Gold Coast lays down causes of disaffection specific to living in what anyone throughout human history would have little difficulty identifying as a utopia, so too The Wild Shore also lays down its specific anxieties, by flat-out showing us that any Eden’s chiefly a state of mind — that is, it’s a reality based on what’s relative to it — and that therefore (just as in The Gold Coast for that matter, only the values are flipped around) what you’ve lost is quite as important as what you’ve gained, when it comes to knowing the worth of what you have. In our own lives we all know about, what shall I call it, the climb from grace…we’re accustomed to calling it a fall, but it isn’t a fall: Rousseau may actually have had that one right, no matter what else he was wrong about. “Man is born free”? Um, maybe not, Johnny boy — but it seems sensible to me to claim every generation moves up to alienation, instead of dropping down on it. I mean, just look around you: Rousseau’s conjectural history may be as factually full of shit as anything else the Enlightenment Men ever came up with (cough cough, private vices make public virtues), but so far as it says we weren’t given our modern anxieties by natural social gravitation, but instead forged those chains for ourselves on purpose, it at least flirts with the realistic. Which is more than a lot of other theories depending from that time can say.

But then, if our world’s about the climb…

Then what would a real fall look like?

And, what could we learn, by imagining it?

Of course it’s not a new thought by any means. My own first encounter with it was in the venerable Earth Abides, but that’s only because I was born when and where I was, and not at some other time or place. Science fiction loves the Fall, so much so that it probably has many more interesting things to say about it than any given religion that claims the idea as touchstone…but then it isn’t like there’s anything outre about mixing speculative literature with religious questions anyway, is there? I mean it simply happens all the time; mostly automatic, I should judge. Very, very common stuff: conjectural history in reverse. Rousseau as SF author. Sure, absolutely.

Why not?

Hey, after all no one writes a post-Apocalypse story by accident!

So maybe Robinson’s right: maybe the only good utopia’s a dead one, at that.

But let’s look at it some more, and see what we find. Of course in a way about ninety percent of SF stories are technically “post-apocalyptic”, what with all the Great Disasters and massive social/technological upheavals of the past that lurk in the margins — stories of settlers living on other planets are post-apocalyptic too, as are stories of people travelling between cosmopolitan Jack Vance worlds loaded with footnotes and aliens. Folks like William Gibson write (as Sean W. has recently reminded me) stories where what’s really changed or passed away is barely apprehended by the reader, let alone the characters, and I suppose at the other extreme folks like Ursula LeGuin write stories where the tenor of Robinson’s Pacific Edge isn’t achieved by grassroots political organizing towards an idea of “future”, but by immensities of time operating on human culture to produce a new and more bottomless past, that replaces futurity entirely. Even such a mainstream success as Nevil Shute gets into this general swing of things in his tales of the mad bad twentieth century — and as always, whenever you have a traveller who arrives near the Omega Point (or as we often see, a traveller who carries Omega Points with him wherever he goes), there you have a past and a future which are both lost to sight, a close horizon of the present that in “proper” modern literature is similarly always felt, even if it’s hardly ever turned into something that can actually be looked at as it is in SF. Utopia, we might almost say, is such an unnatural state that you can only really find it in the eyes of hurricanes or on the lips of black holes — special places where the feedback loops of possibility and consequence are drawn extraordinarily tight, so much so in fact that characters are likely to bring Omega all over again whenever they stir within that artificial simplicity, and snap the symmetry of things by acting as clinamen to the uninterrupted symmetry of particle-fall…

Or then again maybe that was a bit flowery, and maybe I’m wrong anyway: because what is the message of a “fall” utopia? As always, when it comes to concretizing the metaphor, J.G. Ballard is way out in front of the pack — in “The Ultimate City” we are (I think) meant to see that utopia is a creature of aesthetic, and that the thing called “aesthetic” is always produced by a context of history, will you nill you: in other words, that the bad old beforedays are gone is what makes them a place where the utopian urge can be sited and played out, and achieve a vibrancy that the “after” world’s utopian urges never can. Because the non-simple loops of consequence and possibility are still there, of course: they may be too dead to create the present directly anymore, but they still supply it with aesthetic-producing past, and so make utopia’s reflective aesthetic possible. In The Wild Shore, the United States is cordoned off from the rest of the world, which still goes on about its modern, technological business — not knowing what else to do. But because it’s still alive, that’s not where the utopian urge is sited; history in the rest of the world hasn’t come to an end as history within America has, and so doesn’t get to have a do-over. Out past the continental shelf are submarines like flaming swords, guarding a limitless Eden full of particle rain…but nothing else, and so that’s their problem. The story only proceeds in the land where it’s possible to wish for perfection, or transfiguration — not in the land where these things are rendered impossible by a paucity (or should that be “over-richness”?) of eventuating feedback. When he moves on sequentially to The Gold Coast, Robinson details for us exactly why the that past-present-future continuum is so limited in scope when it comes to such expressive ideals, in (again) a way we all know very well — it’s not news that in an “open” world such as our own the limitlessness of horizon is itself a barrier to self-understanding: as we can’t help but be aware, it takes tremendous amounts of both work and luck to locate an arena in which the individual can have a specific value to himself, can paint his inner self on the walls of the outside world despite them being so damned tall.

Of course this is the world we’ve made, so it’s the one we’ve got — and it would be silly and graceless of us to want to cure our alienation by simply obliterating the work of our hands. Wouldn’t it? In the real world, by definition, we don’t get to have utopia — having climbed up to alienation, all we can then do is climb up again, to try to get over the top of it. Though occasionally we might secretly wish for aliens to come down and blast us into the state of being other people — of having always been other people — nevertheless in this world we cannot go down, not even if it’s to Pacific Edge.

But in fiction: yup, we can play around with that kind of thing. Mostly just for a little while, of course — although part of what makes Ursula LeGuin’s brilliance such an essentially frustrating one (for example) is that for her that “little while” can be extended all the way to the conceptual vanishing point, only actually ceasing once you close the book — for her, a “fall” utopia is really a spring utopia, a spring without a summer — which is an impossible state no matter how elegantly-drawn, but that we can imagine it at all gives us a utopian safety-valve, for imagining ourselves world-painters. And maybe that imagination is simplistic; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fruitful simplicity to explore, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any surprises inside it. Hard not to think back to the Sixties, little re-tribalization cults building geodesic domes out in the desert for the cost of eight bucks of pipe and a two dollar socket wrench…in my part of the world, people turned all Richard Brautigan, haring off into the wilds of the coastline to make a new start with their sexy friends, and find a new context in the history and geography that was “out there” already. Lost? We’re not lost…hey, this is Captain America calling…

Of course in Europe at this time, they saw “revolution” as a different kind of fish: a different kind of culture politics.

But here…

Well, maybe that’s a topic for another time. But anyway, utopia: you know, weirdly, it almost could have happened here, and that’s the key thing about it. If you squint hard enough, you can see that the creation of a massive new past was indeed what was going on out there in the desert with the hippies and the domes, up on the coast with the squatters and the boats, or for that matter in RAB’s beloved World’s Fair, or even in the dwindling echoes of Habitat that I grew up with in the early Seventies here on the beach in Vancouver. And naturally this was all in the wake of Apocalypse, too — in the wake of colossal social/technological change barely apprehensible by the characters who were living through it. A World War and a GI Bill and some oil, that’s really all it took…a few years later you get Woodstock, and then a few years after that you get perestroika.

And then you get all this.

But in a way it could still happen, you see, could happen now in a way previously impossible, because of how it didn’t happen then because it couldn’t be done: because it’s dead now, if you take my point. A dead new past, is just another post-apocalyptic world that provides the context that feeds aesthetic: the essential deadness of past failed utopias, that in science fiction signals the opportunity to re-site those urges to perfection in the same spot again, and thus get oneself a post-Fall do-over, signals an opportunity in the real world too: the opportunity to examine how what could be imagined as “future” in the past of our imagination has fallen out of contact with what can be imagined as “future” now, in our imaginative present. Thus the Orange County Trilogy is a failed relic of ideal now too, as the record of an imagined future whose potential branching now lies behind us some little way off in the past — though it was a good guess, I still think — but that isn’t to say it’s now lost all its value to us.

Because maybe, now it has even more value?

Max Weber said that it takes about forty years for an elite idea to filter down into the popular consciousness — and maybe he had the numbers wrong, or maybe he had them right but then they changed, but consider this: we tend to think of history as a series of blips, a series of incidents bounded by a string of causes that diminish, like echoes, the further in time they get from the incidents that define their meaning. And why we think this way I don’t know, but we probably shouldn’t: anyway Weber didn’t, and in his amusing little notion of the cook-down time of ideas, no matter what we think about it in the abstract, there may be a good lesson for us. All that dead apocalyptic past we collected in the postwar era, is none of it working on us today? Probably all of it is: the hippies in the desert were just early-adopters, you see. They didn’t own their Movement, they just belonged to it. And if we believed the tale of diminishing incident causes we might say that doesn’t matter, but apply a little Weber to the problem: Silent Spring came out when?

On The Road came out when?

Dangerous Visions came out when?

The Second Sex came out when?

It’s entirely possible that all these people did not really know what they were doing in a historical context: they may have been trying to inaugurate an aesthetic, but aesthetic lives in the context of its own self-defining past as much as in the contradistinguishing past of what came before it…and without that interplay it can only be imagined as one day existing, if what’s inaugurated turns out to have some sticking-power. But you can’t have it, at the beginning! Because you have to wait and see how it turns out, first. Early adopters are rather banned from sifting practicality from ideal anyway, since the goal is to break practice with ideal — but that really just means to change practice, and usually in order for practice to be changed, ideal has first to die a miserable failure. And you can’t blame anyone for not wanting to think about those particular hard knocks too carefully…however in books it can be thought of, because books serve (as people do not) as the record of what the thing that failed was, before it actually went belly-up. Thus, the Orange County Trilogy means more today than it did on publication, precisely because its three utopias have passed out of the scope of what can be proposed as notional “future” to the contemporary imagination — having lost their predictive thrill, they’ve gained a descriptive utility to replace it with: not capable of being trees anymore, they’ve instead become soil. Which means what they stood for hasn’t died, but rather renewed its potential to come alive: because after all you can’t plant trees in trees. You can’t drink out of raindrops.

You can only drink out of streams.

So, in which fictional post-apocalyptic aesthetic should we plant our utopian urges today? Of course we cannot actually fall to them, we already know that! Omega Points are not easy to come by in real life, they’re just hypothetical test-cases — we can’t rely on them to solve our problems for us. But as rough negatives of the map of the climb, they’re far from useless; they may not be flashlights, but they are batteries. And it may not be night yet, but it probably will be soon.

Let’s stop and make camp here for a while, maybe light a nice science-fictional fire. Omega is far below us.

Alpha’s still above.

And since though men go and come, earth abides…well, let’s let it abide with us a little while.

Fast falls the eventide, and all that.

Oh no, I think I’ve written another ridiculous blogifesto.

But oh, well. Pass the beans, please.

And the links, too.

Hopefully that all adds up to a meal.

Here Is Something Special That Is Just For You

You know, sometimes Grant Morrison knocks me right out.

If his career ended today, he would already have left behind a large-ish collection of scenes in comics — just scenes — that are as good as most of the good comics I have ever read. But the really weird thing about this is, that so many of these scenes occur in what you’d call your sort of straight-up old-fashioned running-out-of-gas superhero comics.

These may be the world’s simplest stories, by now; and yet they’re dangerous as hell for being overcharged with crappy nostalgic elements, like so many jars of hydrazine with rusty lids. But Morrison not only handles the jars so lovingly that he can do terrifying things with them and live, but so deftly (it may be the same thing) that he makes what’s simple look complicated. Before he shows it as simplicity again.

So…is it Pop Magic?

Oh, I think so.

In Seven Soldiers, Zatanna reaches up to find the S.U.M. looking down — “Zatanna, you’re something else” — and Shilo escapes the Life Trap…and there is no earthly reason why these things should pack the punch they do, but they do, because it may not be pity and fear but something important’s being purged here: because these are not just the people you meet in dreams, they’re the reasons you meet the people you meet in dreams, and Morrison doesn’t just want to free those people, he wants to free those reasons…

And if that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Superheroes. They just shouldn’t work anymore at all. Just about all the people who used to know how to install and service them are retired, and those that are left have mostly become crank niche-hobbyists, kit-builders who carelessly slop around the hydrazine on their clothes, on the carpet, everywhere. A few still run shops out of their own garages, neat and tidy and up-to-code, with clean coveralls and shiny, spotless tools, but the market’s shrunk so much that by and large there just isn’t any mainstream joy left to be found in that business. It’s all about the collector trade now. You see one of those machines on the street and think “wow, I remember those days”, but you say that knowing they haven’t come again, and they’re probably not going to.

But then every once in a while you get a thing like All-Star Superman, don’t you?

And then everything changes for the better.

Morrison has gone at this all backwards, or at least he’s gone at it radically out of order: trying to chart the course of his career from promising novice to brilliant journeyman to self-possessed master is just like following one of his beloved multidimensional acid-trip schisnarratives. I mean, surely The Invisibles ought properly to be an old man’s work? And doesn’t We3 or Seaguy or Vimanarama make more sense as the first independent effort of an art-school wunderkind? Really, shouldn’t Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo have come after JLA and New X-Men, and along with The Filth? In his corporate work he fails utterly to proceed in linear fashion from milestone to milestone as we might expect him to — his masterpiece is delayed and delayed, regardless of Big Breaks. And then it finally arrives — stunningly — with Seven Soldiers: after Seven Soldiers, if you don’t know what Grant Morrison cares about in his own craft it’s because you’re not paying attention, and after Seven Soldiers all comparisons with other writers become superfluous. He graduates.

But then starts right up again, out of order, working on the young man’s game of playing with continuities, and reconciling inconsistencies!

As if the precious graduation had never happened at all!

But then at the same time he shows that it did happen, because he does All-Star Superman.

You can keep your 52s and your Final Crises, bloggers. Enjoy ‘em; get the good from them; I applaud you for liking them. But those are just projects, those are just products, those are just outputs. They’re a little cold. All-Star Superman, on the other hand, is a very special thing that has been made just for you. Like all Morrison’s stories, it’s a simple one: Superman as psychopomp. But, what a world is in that gemlike idea! Pop Magic, indeed!

He simply brings it all back to life, and sets the reasons free. Even now, I think, they are right here in this room.

It’s like a kind of literature he’s made with this stuff. Astonishing. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

Morrison, you’re something else.

…And The Lamentation Of Your Armadillos

Good morning, you Bloggers of Comic. I seem to have been up all night, now how did that happen? Anyway, I’m here now.

And today would have been Steve Gerber’s 61st birthday. I am sure he would want us all to have a party.

I think I’ve said all I possibly can in a public forum about how much Steve meant to me as a reader; have not yet exhausted all the things I can say in private life about him, and probably never will. Because, uh, among other reasons no one outside the comics blogosphere is likely to get how important that Steve connection was to me.

But anyway I’ll just mark this day, today, and I won’t mark his death-day’s anniversary when it comes around. His death-day, after all, did nothing for me. But his birthday did a lot to shape the person I am now, or at least most of the things I like about that person.

The truth is, I was lucky.

Or, actually, it wasn’t luck.

Englehart, see your doctor regularly. Ed, it wouldn’t kill you to pick up the goddamn phone once in a while.

Let’s all remember to bank a couple of dollars with The Hero Initiative if we can, some way — somehow I am hoping against hope that someone will volunteer to make a Man-Thing candle (or something) that I can buy for some truly outrageous price at my LCS, proceeds to go to. Something like that would make it easier for people to contribute, I think.

Steve, so long. And Happy Birthday. And thanks.

Hope they’ve got lots of paper towels where you are.

Topics In Fantasy: Emily Carr, Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Los Bros Hernandez, And The Hibakushi

That last one means: “explosion-affected persons”.

Japanese for A-bomb survivor.

“At last, to see through the inner eye of the totem!”, says a transported Emily Carr in one of those dreadfully quotable Canada Post-sponsored “Canadian Heritage” commercials: describing her achievement as a painter. Hey, for crappy historical whitewash, you have to admit those things are written kinda catchy…

And in truth, that line gets very close to the heart of Carr’s fascination with the remnants of Native culture on the B.C. coast: well, white people’s stories of this part of the world have always been about women travelling off in boats, out of their own society and into another, at least partly interior, world. As the saying goes: “Canada is a nation of people who have traded their history for geography”, and it’s true enough, except the missing term in that equation is that all this geography was once someone else’s history, before Us Guys decided to try to erase it, turn it all from living present into deep dead past, into archaeology…before we decided to try to empty the landscape, and so telescope time.

Unfortunately, we did a pretty good job of it.

So when Emily Carr goes off into the coastal waters, what she finds is Indiana Jones’ wet dream: hundreds and hundreds of miles of spun-out Macchu Picchu, moss-covered Thunderbird heads buried in the forest, nursery logs for mystery and awe, dead gods of the geography she’d traded for. The alien soul of the landscape.

It took her hard.

So she began to paint it; and in so doing was transported.

Okay?

Okay, so let’s talk about what I’m going to call the Spielbergian generation of American filmmakers. Because they discovered something too, and were transported too, as they strove to see through the inner eye of their totems. Which were, of course, cars.

Cars: did anything take Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis and all the rest of them so hard as the mystery and the awe of the car? I’m here to argue not; the generation or half-generation before them discovered postwar America through faces — John Wayne’s face, Marlon Brando’s face, Robert Redford’s face, Jane Fonda’s face, Peter Boyle’s face, Gene Hackman’s face — and those were the uncertain totems whose inner eyes they saw through, those were the mysteriously abandoned geographies, archaeologies, that transported them…but for Spielberg and his ilk, it was always the car. Seen as through the eyes of a child, the congress of cars as America, pure shape and pure colour moving swiftly through the landscape of dream, a million fast totems on about their mythological business, making space where previously there had been no space before, and roaring about it. The new Ford Doppler, now with even more new proportion-establishing technology…!

You may think I exaggerate. But, there is something compelling about the car as a symbolic carrier. The car speaks of something, to artists of that era, that human voices can’t quite say.

Consider the aggressively dreamlike nature of the early car/stunt movie, now an American genre staple called, vaguely enough, “action”. Born in the time when automobiles meant something more as far as freedom and individuality were concerned than they had meant in earlier decades — and note that this “more” meaning of freedom and individuality was also coupled with a “less” meaning of anonymity and dissolution that was new as well, as far as the humble car went — always the fascination of the young, that liminal state between personhood and destiny, love and suicide, being and non-being — born in that time of youthful grasping at realizing the in-betweenness of it all, these car/stunt movies were amazingly galvanizing at the time in a way we can be forgiven for forgetting today, and also in love with the absurd concretization of inner states by the outward heft of style in steel and chrome in a way that today, if we only thought about it, we would have to find touchingly naive. The other day, I saw the recent remake of The Italian Job — Ed Norton repeats the wild technique first pioneered by Ron Howard in Grand Theft Auto, of having the helicopter break all the rules of where things are supposed to be and what they’re supposed to do, by chasing the car down where the street is.

The helicopter becomes the car’s enemy: trying to restrain its freedom.

Just as the crop-duster — God love it, the venerable crop-duster! — my favourite’s the one in Capricorn One! — becomes the car-substitute, the “car of the skies”, the freedom of the new young American individual to find new ways to “drive”?

God, remember how those guys used to be just so absolutely fixated on the anonymity and independence of the crop-duster? As John Bunyan was fixated on the spiritual symbolism of the freaking bird.

But anyway…that’s all fine for the Seventies, of course, but in the 2000′s what Ed Norton does with his helicopter is fucking stupid. That naivete won’t hold up in the present day: to crash through liminality as the Spielberg generation did with their outlandishly over-the-top conception of what a “stunt” could be…I mean this was something that was so new, this was seeing through the inner eye of the totem of film for sure! The helicopter chases the car! Dreams break through into daylight! But in the remake of The Italian Job, you’ve got to know that things just don’t work that way. We’re better educated now, this isn’t a Columbo episode where the Lieutenant finds out something about what a Polaroid is, or how the phone system works…all the infrastructure that seemed tinged with magic to the naive senses of young Seventies filmmakers, essentially impressionistic as a child’s understanding of what Daddy does when he’s at work…we know all about that stuff now. “Action” movies have carved out that understanding in our brains. So Ed Norton flies in circles around Los Angeles, but give me a break, this is not the same cultural idiom that once was, and we all know he can’t do that…! You can’t just jump into a helicopter and fly off and do what you please, this is not the part in Frosty The Snowman where Karen and the kids just don’t understand about traffic lights or train tickets or that the temperature doesn’t go up because the thermometer “gets red”, but the thermometer “gets red” because the temperature goes up…

Sorry, ranting…

And hey, I liked The Italian Job. But it just made me laugh to see old Ed in that helicopter. Because I don’t care how many millions you’ve got, life and action are not as free as they were thirty-five years ago, and when we see that sort of thing in a movie and accept it we are not accepting it for the same reasons as we did when it was fresh. We are not accepting it as the sudden amplification of a symbolic dynamic, we are accepting it as an action-movie convention, that’s lost all its power to thrill, or shock, or yes I’ll say it: transport. Ed N. flies around up there the way he does because he lives in a world that works by the rules of the world of movies. But in more ancient times, the symbolic charge would have come from him flying around in a world that works by the rules of the world…said world not yet having rules that have been entirely fixed and understood in “action” terms. Today’s action-movie conventions are as recognizable as they are varied, and as varied as they are immutable: elevators have trapdoors, buildings have easily-accessible airducts a person can squeeze through, guns can shoot off locks on doors, people set passwords on their computers that conform to a description of the thing they are trying to block other people from looking at. Try typing in “Secret Doomsday Weapon”, 007…

Understand, I’m not speaking against any of it!

But the unreality of all that stuff is as well understood in the present day, as it was poorly understood in the days of the Spielbergian stuntmasters.

You see, it’s all about what the dreamscape is. It’s all about what’s in it. That’s what I’m trying to say. It never was “realism”. But it reflected a different fantasy image of “realism”, than the one it reflects today. Belief was suspended on different things, in different places, and to different effects.

We forget: these guys invented “action”. They invented the summer blockbuster. Okay, we don’t actually forget, obviously, because we say it all the time, but we forget what things were like before these guys came on the scene. We forget what made them great in the first place.

I am saying: it was the car. It was how they understood the romance of the car. It was how they thought, or felt, that the car was really important. Star Wars has a lot of the car in it — everything’s about the car. Corvette Summer is, pretty obviously, about the car. I mean watch that movie again today: it doesn’t make any fucking sense. It still carries the viewer through, but it’s stupid today, in a way it wasn’t when it came out. Because of how it’s about the car, because of how the cultural idiom of car-ness has changed, because it is naive in a way that seems very nearly aphasic today. I Wanna Hold Your Hand is, admittedly a little less obviously, about the car. American Graffiti is painfully obviously about the car, I mean even more than Corvette Summer is (although it’s got a better excuse). Jaws is just a car movie in sharky clothes. I am perhaps not making the best argument I could be making here. But: I’m telling you.

It’s all about the car.

Um, I’m gonna fix those examples later, to make more sense…

Sorry! Ranting.

But ANYWAY…

The dreamscape, right. Seeing, finally, through the inner eye of the totem.

I’m sure you know who does it best: the Japanese. The telescoping of time, that drops a chasm in-between the future and the past? Check, check, check. Check. The understanding of the romance that inhabits wordlessly potent technological symbols, vehicles, prostheses? Of the chromed shagfoal of futurity? You know they say you can chrome anything; you can chrome toast, if you want to. Check, check, bloody check.

The dramatic implications of the artificially-emptied landscape? The transportation through different ways of seeing? The archaeology in faces? Because that’s what the totems really are, you know: faces…

Oh my God. Soooo check.

The Japanese, as usual, are ahead of everybody.

Only excepting, perhaps, the Hernandez brothers.

Now watch as this all comes together, but hopefully not too much like water swirling down a drain: you want “explosion-affected people”? The understanding of romance in wordlessly-potent symbols of technology? A fractured world, a world that carves itself out from nothing, a world with as-yet-unfixed rules, a world where naivete crashes through liminality looking for at least a smoke, a beer, and a girl, anyway at least for tonight? A world of aimless streets, a world of roaring cars, a world where the past and the future maybe meant to get married but didn’t, and then each fell in love with somebody else? And where places get lost to themselves, and maps get all turned around, and there is no easy navigation except in the cracking-apart of mute, pregnant symbol? I was going to talk about All-Star Superman today, but in a way Jaime and Gilbert have been doing All-Star Superman for decades. To take influences and treat them all as though they were important for themselves, to really pick them up and turn them to use, and apologize to no one for it. To make The Best of something that’s been seen before, so many times, and refresh it for everybody else while doing so. You know, I really am looking forward to posting that thing I have in mind about All-Star Superman. But Love And Rockets has perfected the art of seeing through the inner eye of the totem, and attuning itself to the emptied landscape’s alien soul: all those old punks, tough lady wrestlers, master mechanics, dinosaurs, superheroes…real towns in imaginary places, real places in imaginary towns, dream countries, lost empires, history for geography, and faces, faces everywhere, and always in dramatic contrast. You see every fantasy worth its salt is the archaeology of a dream, a symbolism, a meaning buried in peculiar felicities of word or picture that jump up (like the devil) and grab the end experiencer by the throat, somehow. Everything is about something, in some way.

I mean, look at Robert Redford’s face, in all of his movies. His face is the whole point. Robert Redford has never looked like a normal person, NEVER. This was the car chase of the generation and half-generation of filmmakers before the Spielbergites: that jarringly familiar dream-face, surrounded by aggressively “ordinary” other faces also out of nowhere but dream, like the dreamily-ordinary clothes, buildings, shots, routines, atmosphere, that all strove together to blow everything up in a great big BANG! Robert Redford, the human special effect. This guy was always a guy out of place and time, through no fault of his own, but that was the whole point. In that, he was just like America itself. But, too, like America, it wasn’t exactly that he was innocent, even if it all wasn’t really his fault: in Three Days Of The Condor, Faye Dunaway looks at him and says: “there’s something about your eyes…not kind. But honest.” It’s a remarkable line, for how absolutely directly it’s shot right into the face of the audience, just like that. Years later, in The Electric Horseman, something similarly arresting: one night while they’re trekking across country, Jane Fonda turns to Redford and nervously asks “are we lost?” He smiles and replies: “Lost? We’re not lost.”

He means: there’s no such thing as lost, because there’s no such thing as not lost.

Just like Maggie’s not lost either; she’s just been affected by an explosion.

She’s been transported.

Like we all should be, when we walk into a theatre. And the lights CRASH down around us.

Pretty quickly turning us to remnants, there in the dark. Hidden nursery logs. Faces lost in the trees. Things grown wild, whose origins have been misplaced. Totemic junkyards, forgotten meanings: somebody else’s archaeology.

Hey, Dr. Jones? You should wake up now, probably.

I think Akira just stole your Rolls-Royce.

You might want to get a picture of that. It looks just like that scene from Butch Cassidy.

Through And Out The Other Side

Well…

I’m back. Whatever that means.

It’s been a runaround for the last month and a half or so, I’ll tellya. Always picking up and going, never really arriving. For a guy like me, who’s spent roughly the last decade spending five months a year perched on the deck of a cabin in the trees — doing not too much except fill up notebooks, and lose track of time — it’s an uncomfortable return to a certain part of my early twenties when I was always in motion through having no other choice. Through having no other place to be. Until, unexpectedly, I finally just wound up somewhere, that I can never quite say if I actually somehow chose, or just left unchosen for long enough that it became inevitable.

For me, this unexpected winding-up was symbolized by the Hot Pepper Cafe, on Commercial Drive in Vancouver’s East End. A greasy spoon across from the Park Of The Hippie Drummers, it had two breakfast specials on offer, Breakfast “A” and Breakfast “B”, which you could eat while peering out the foggy bay windows at the various boho types who infested the place, coming and going like tide-rip. To this day, Commercial Drive is still my city’s Little Italy, and still our main bohemian-type district…but back then, for a time, it was our Little San Francisco too. Circa 1968, I should judge. But anyway.

It all goes back a little deeper than that.

When I was in Grade One, I was a precocious reader. Problem! Because they ran out of things to give me to do, in the Grade One classroom. So they got some old Phonics booklets from — somewhere — and tried those on me, which worked great until I ate ‘em all up, and then they had no other notion but to send me to the library. And in so doing, they sealed my fate.

I had never been all by myself, unsupervised, in those big elementary school hallways before, you see. It was trippy. Behind the closed doors of the classrooms, voices like ghosts, voices out of the fairy fort, shadows behind frosted glass. Through the door of the library: nobody home here, either. I guess now that the librarian was out having a smoke, or getting another cup of coffee, maybe carrying on an affair with another teacher in the lounge. Who knows? But anyway the library was totally deserted. “Hello?” I whispered, afraid to call…

If you knew about me as a really little kid, you’d laugh at this. But never mind. I spent as long as I dared in there, but the librarian didn’t return, so I…

Checked out a book.

And then it just happened to be, in a strange way, the wrong kind of book. That’s all. It was a book about some kids with an over-rich fantasy life, secret tunnels and motivations and masks, hidden identities and purposes, and no adults to be found anywhere. I left the library then, book in hand, like a kind of space-traveller — down the deserted hallway I floated, through the toppled elevator-shaft-like tunnel, all untethered — until hand met door, found by decoding the symbols on the plates on the top of the filing-cabinets they called classrooms in those days — and then BANG! Sound and light, and people.

I was back.

But not in one piece, I fancy; at least, I wasn’t quite the same kid who’d left.

Because when I just got a little bit older, I discovered something really bizarre: that there was an entire species of literature devoted to plumbing the strangeness of my long walk to and from the library that day. When in future I would read The Magician’s Nephew, I would recall peering at the nameplates of all those alternate-universe classrooms, trying to figure which was the right one…when I would see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the feeling of floating down the hall from this lost twenty minutes of my life would slam back into the active parts of my brain, demanding to know who’d been reading its diary. But of course it was very far from ending there: it didn’t even have to be science fiction or fantasy per se that got me after a while, so thoroughly was the motif worked into, or drawn upon by, the popular entertainment I could lay my hands on. The Poseidon Adventure worked the same magic on me as Rocket Ship Galileo did; Tom Sawyer carried almost as big a charge as The Hobbit. The Three Investigators inhabited much the same world as the Swiss Family Robinson, when it came down to it; and if they did, then didn’t that mean even the more conformablility-based stuff like the Hardy Boys did too? Kind of? I mean, if you really looked at them closely? But then it didn’t stop with the Hardy Boys either: the wider my attention spread, the more I saw how this stuff was everywhere. After a while, it was like standing in a hail of tuning forks. I wondered how other people managed to miss it. What made all my fellow genre geeks hear it, when everybody else seemed shockingly deaf to it? Did it, perhaps, all come down to taking a walk to a library unescorted one day, at a sufficiently young age?

Anyway here I am. Back. September 15th, and the main part of my summer is just beginning now, finally. Time at the beach, soaking up sun and salt water. To a guy who likes swimming in the ocean as much as I do, these September days are all like perfect little snowflakes — each day the water is a little clearer and a little colder, and there’s a lot to miss if you let a day slip by you. And it’s all utterly without supervision, unless you count the sun as a supervisor.

Still, on occasion one has to wonder how the hell one ended up where one is, after all. In high school, the effect of my walk to the library years before bore the tremendous fruit of me skipping all the classes I could, just to see what other unsupervised people were doing with their days. Old ladies arguing in coffee shops, young Chinese guys working for their uncles in grocery stores, mechanics going to McDonald’s to get lunch. Twenty-year-olds smoking pot in back alleys. Cops. On one notable occasion, the Queen of England. It wasn’t quite the cool green shade of the mountain that Tom Sawyer thinks about while he’s trapped in school, but it was pretty damn interesting anyway. Compelling. Hypnotic. I practically fell into it; it was like living one of the books we had to read for CanLit. I mean there it all was: life, as it’s lived when nobody’s watching.

It’s a common thing to hear people describe certain of their experiences as “like a movie”, by which they clearly mean that the sense of super-vision is sometimes very strong, without quite crossing the threshold into an actual deja vu experience: going to a new school, graduating from that school, getting a job as a janitor or as a corporate Santa Claus, bumming around scenester parties, attending university…in each case you can practically hear the James Brown music swelling in the background, easily anticipate finding that your psychology prof is Robin Williams or something, see yourself as if from above sifting through crowds looking for the love interest that you know must be there, because that’s how movies work…I was never particularly interested in this little cognitive quirking, though. The essential musicality at the heart of the near-deja vu experience, the sense of being subtly guided from scene to scene…not that it couldn’t be pleasant, not that it wasn’t stimulating, because it was, but to me it wasn’t quite as cool as the other stuff, the shocking sense of being not guided, not coaxed into hitting the proper mark, but just thrown out of context, and into content. A few years later, eating Breakfast “B” at the Hot Pepper and wondering how to find a job — while the hippies beat their bongos across the street — I found myself breathing a sigh of relief despite the money worries, because all at once it became apparent to me that I was offscreen again, and possibly this time for good. Musicality was replaced by the clanking and rattling of a steamy kitchen, and the direct squort of ketchup going onto eggs. It was exactly not like all my synaesthesia, weird perceptual distortions, that week in Grade Nine where I had four blazing deja vu attacks a day, it was just like: life, when no one’s watching.

And very pleasant it was, too.

And now I’m back, after all the interminable milling about on ferries and buses, in cars with dogs and girls, and walking on railroad tracks to noplace in particular. Like I’ve suddenly jumped all the way from my twenties, back into my forties. My forties? Now, something about that just doesn’t sound right, does it? So I wonder if I have just wound up here somehow, in the same way I wound up at the Hot Pepper all them years ago, skin tingling as the sausages sizzled and the hippies danced. The life I lead is something of a strange one, I occasionally think, moving in epileptic fits and starts, a Zeno’s paradox of “now you’re here”, “now you’re here”, “now you’re here”. Arrows fired at the target, hanging frozen in the air wondering when and how and by whose agency they will arrive, if indeed they ever do. And now I’m here. Starting summer in September, on sunny Bowen Island. It seems impossible.

Where on earth does the time go?

It just floats up into the sky, or something. Weird, huh.

Okay, excuse me, Bloggers: I’ve got a beach to attend to. More on this story as it develops.

I Don’t Think They Like Him Much, Do You?

But I do.

The times I like him best, I guess, are the times when he gets caught in a question he both can’t answer honestly, and hasn’t been adequately prepared for.  These are the times when a profound hesitancy emerges, just for a second, and his eyes seem to say:

“Holy crap, what have I done?”

That’s the John McCain I know, or like to think I know:  the guy who really doesn’t believe any of this shit, who’s just saying it all to get elected, but who’s seriously not that good a liar, and who’s unconsciously sabotaging himself at every step because he can’t stand the dishonesty of it all.

In other words, the guy they don’t like.  Oh, they frickin’ LOOOOOVE that Palin chick, wow!  They’re absolutely nuts for her.  But McCain, not so much.  He’s out there to lose.  They would’ve really rather had anybody else (well, maybe except Huckabee;  yet strangely, not Romney), and it shows.  Every eulogistic word about John McCain rings horribly false to my ears, here, and I mean horribly.  This is the most evil procession of two-faced rabble-rousing speechifiers I’ve ever witnessed.  There’s a chewy centre of rotten nastiness here, underneath the stale coating of white-bread wishful thinking, and it stinks to high heaven.  In all probability, these people hate John McCain.

So, he’s got one unassailable credential, at least.

And now I pray he’ll live up to it.  Oh, it won’t happen!  But how I yearn to see him come out on that stage and blow it all off.  Blow it off, and blow it away.  It’s what I’d do, no joke:  I’d come out and lambaste them all for their intolerance and myopia and greed and hypocrisy and just plain lying, I’d call them vultures and false friends and I’d storm right outta there.  “Here, have Lieberman instead, you like him about as much as me anyway!”  I’d say scornfully.

Because Lieberman is the John McCain of the Democratic party.

This whole thing’s really quite sickening.  Thank God it’ll be over soon.