The antidote to terrorism: Fox's 'who wants to be a princess?' (who wants to go to a party that 'only the aristocracy and celebrities can attend' and get a 40,000 dollah necklace?).
The analogy to Pearl Harbor is particularly apt. In a foreign policy course in college, studied Pearl harbor extensively. In fact, there were a variety of warnings. Our choice to recive and portray an 'unexpected sneak attack' was a political/policy decision.
Followed blog links to Salon's topical articles on 'terror sex' and the return-in-time-of-crisis-ex... According to Salon, everyone’s having “apocalypse sex”. I can’t get “overdue library book” snogging. Everyone’s being called by concerned exes; I did not get called by any exlovers but my landlord has called 4 times for the rent.
“Sins of the father visited on the son”
“Hey dad, can I have the keys to the country? Oops I totaled the country” symbolism of Bush in power.
Perhaps Monica Lewinsky’s was the blowjob that ended the world (backlash against gore, bush in power. Total war)
The world's attention has moved on. Blogs, even those recommended by 'blogs I trust' spout or link smug left-wing rhetoric on intelligence (or lack therof), tolerence (ditto), warfare (one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter). Meanwhile, we suffer from sick-city syndrome. I fully expect this illness to be 'discovered' and defined by investigative journalists to-come. Wanting to encourage business-and-tourism-as-usual, toxic levels of molten plastics, solvents, asbestos, and organic corruption are dismissed by government p.r. as 'acceptable'; several million New Yorkers develop symptoms from autoimmune disorders to chronic asthma, birth defects shoe in the 'terror sex' baby boom (Salon sez: 'best sex I ever had; we fucked as if it were the end of the world. to U2 as well'). Last night was my first foray from the gravitational vortex of ground hero or whatever the fuck. I did a soundscape to accompany Heather Woodbury's performance, Track 9 of 12. She did a fantastic job of incorporating 'the thing' without restructuring her entire narrative around it. I'd not read the script, there was no run-through, but it seemed to work. 103rd St, El Tailler Latinamericano. Took the subway home, doors open on the second avenue F-stop and the acrid, humid, rotting smell is so strong. I tell myself it's just the subway, the way it traps heat and humidity and odor along the tunnels with no ventilation. But the odor increases as I climb the stairs, and then I am home, or blocks away and my eyes sting and I want to retch. Is this what I've becomed accustomed to? Was 103rd St., Broadway, traffic city, Manhattan, the freshest air I've breathed in two weeks? The unsaid about the cloud. What they say in those invariably blue-collar communities where smoldering mines or tire piles have become the defining odor, the accepted. What they said in the communities of honest burghers during wwII: "we didn't know anything about the camps. but there was this sweet burning odor."
Toxi-city; sick-city syndrome. Rat poison, mosquito spraying, the cloud. Just shut up and eat your sushi.
listen to/watch the national media for the 'inside the mind of bin laden' special. See eggheads who've 'lived with the northern alliance rebels' opine. Take a gander at airport security. Now walk a block and a half to the candle and flower-outlined chalk memorial at Thompkins Square. Take the subway at rush hour, and in the Times Square station, one of the most push-and-shove of rush rush-places, crowds of shock-still witnesses to the mural of 'missing' flyers on tile walls. Even just around the corner, a score of flowers and candles. The police leave this encumbrance to pedestrian traffic; passersby respect the one or two silent candle-lighters with heads bowed.
The news machine has moved on to retaliation and security; we are a city in a pall. You can't know, you shouldn't know; may you never know. Let you who cast the first generality have tasted not of specificity, which admits no abstraction and does not ease.
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