The Anniversary Party

Finding America

Blundering to the Heart of the American Dream


"Yeah, well, it's just us a few hundred of our closest friends"

Yeah, everybody's going to the movies. I've also been to the movies (as is evident from my posts of late). Now, after reflecting on Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a brave venture for mainstream film makers and moviegoers, I find myself shaded by the looming shadow of events following late March 2003, that time last year the United States, having bombed, starved and stripped Iraq through one of modern history's most vicious sanctions campaigns, illegally invaded that country, overthrew its government and, using proxy armies (including 1,500 South African mercenaries who constituted a force larger than ally Spain) began—through its 4,000-strong "embassy", to build its Middle East springboard to dominance over Asia and initiate linkage with its hundreds of military bases forming a necklace of death around China.

A year down the line and with a long struggle ahead, I have no wish to revisit the ongoing carnage, mayhem, and despair inflicted by the United States and its vicious ideologues on Iraq and other countries it has destroyed in the recent past, e.g. Argentina, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Haiti, Columbia, etc. I'd rather stick to the movies.

Several months ago, our local pay channel screened Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming’s The Anniversary Party, featuring thirty-something Hollywood Hills couple Sally and Joe Therrian who, reconciled after a lengthy, inter-continental separation, decide to do the done thing and flaunt six years of make believe in front of friends with whom they share, all too frequently, that which they should share with each other. Sally is an intelligent, fast-fading movie star tarnished by a desire to live life to the full, i.e. act, save her marriage and have kids. Her prepubescent British novelist-turned first-time director husband, the ACDC Joe, proves a major drug-addled obstacle to achieving any of her three goals. They are as unlikely a couple as anyone's ever likely to meet but, hey, having met them, I thought I'd share their story with you. It is, after all, their anniversary party.

At least, in these end days of March and early days of faded empire, the movie's title and its characters’ aberrant behaviour are apposite. I do not remember much graphic detail of the film, but one short scene struck me most forcibly. Encapsulating the protagonists' inability to see the absurdity of their fast-deteriorating situation, it lent it great value as a reflection of U.S. values today. I tried to track down mention of what amounted to a single, defining shot and scoured the Web for a review noting it. The Web does not lack movie sites where, supposedly, one can find out anything and everything about one's movie or star of the moment (movies and fame being such fleeting or transitory commodities these days). However, and in keeping with our age of information-clogged ignorance, I found no mention of the scene that so impressed me. We'll get to it later.


"The clock is ticking!"

The Anniversary Party, scripted and filmed on the run in 19 days using digi-cams, exemplifies the potential of our new media and highlights the talent of today's actors and actresses. Jason Leigh and Cummins' coup and part of what amounts to a stunning achievement lay in their decision to cut out the ubiquitous middlemen, the costly directors and producers who, their profits made, end up dictating what audiences see. Throwing together an ensemble of their close friends and scripting the film as they shot it, the two long-time actors produce and direct a film of enormous insight that did not receive its share of deserved acclaim. Why? Put it down to self-hating Americans for all I care... it doesn't matter, the film's great.

The movie equates to the unravelling of a lie as great as that now lived by the United States. Tolerated by a globe envious of its obvious wealth, the U.S. has grown to an adolescence based on falsehoods carrying with them the heartbreak of unpalatable truths. Like the political charade playing itself out on a global stage, Sally and Joe's marriage is an act wherein the players try to outplay each other. There is no trust in this relationship, only a partnership balancing need and enmity, dedicated to the acquisition of selfish resources guaranteeing more of the same. Like Joe and Sally, the United States and the globe are locked in a destructive dance of unhealthy codependence. As Sally tolerates Joe's drug dependence for the sake of a wanted child, we all now suffer Israel's unholy grip on the U.S. body politic.

Okay, that's not really fair. From the outset, it's clear Sally is the one who will carry the day once loosed of Joe. Cumming immediately comes across as a self-absorbed child, far more in need of his wife than she is of him. He is the adolescent. Also, it's clear as the movie gets under way that we're not dealing with ordinary acting talents here. The bond shared by all those participating in The Anniversary Party is evident, electrifies the set, and illuminates a tight, fast-paced script. Against this backdrop of excellence, Cumming and Jason Leigh still manage to shine. As far as seasoned movie reviewers—embedded in the mainstream news media to replicate the publicity given them—are concerned, The Anniversary Party, though good, comes across as a self-indulgent exercise in navel gazing by the idle rich.

Hey, they're not that far off but, in not giving the movie the kudos it deserves, they short-change viewers and those who make the movie work, its writers and actors. Mind you, the writers and actors (or is it just their publicity machine) don't do a bad job of short-changing themselves in the publicity department. The official movie site is a case in point. I find no mention made on it of two actors who, to me, play pivotal roles, Clara Demedrano and Norizzela Monterroso. They portray the Therrians' Spanish-speaking Mexican servants, Rosa and America.

Look, I'm no North American, so I wouldn't know if half the Mexicans in the U.S. are named America, Jesus, or Rosa. The defining character's name is America and that's all there is to it... and then some. To both the people who made the movie and those publicizing it, Rosa and America don't seem to matter. They are airbrushed out of existence. Perhaps, as is the case with most foreigners in America, their presence is accidental or purely utilitarian, not deserving of mention.

I mean, someone has to cook the dinner.

It doesn't matter. Well, it does, but it doesn't, if you know what I mean. Nothing about the U.S. surprises me any more and besides, it has its up side. The Anniversary Party is much like life, a good film in which—much like current international events—the lies, duplicity, denial, self-absorption, greed, selfishness, immaturity and irony on which it is built combine, in the end, to set free an underlying truth evident to all but the characters to whom it should be evident.

We meet Sally and Joe Therrian on the veranda of their spacious, made-to-order glass-and-chrome Hollywood home on the morning of their anniversary celebration under the instruction of their personal yoga teacher, Steven. "Great," I think. "Yoga, the ultimate East meets West For Dummies DIY activity." Yoga, in the West, represents a form of spiritual jogging for mentally obese practitioners who need not leave their yoga mats to do any work. That is, after all, what they pay their personal trainers for. Much as the U.S.' derisive scorn of global opprobrium sets it beyond a capability to understand itself, the Therrians’ facile appreciation of an ancient art is born of a lifestyle distinctly at odds with their ability to appreciate what this slice of culture has to offer them. Their love of it is as empty as their addiction to each other. The movie is off to a good start.

Enter servants Rosa and America, who we see through the open sliding doors separating them from the earnestly re-united couple and their rent-a-guru contortionist. They start setting up the dining-room table for the evening's celebration of a union made in all the world's free capitals and that bastion of entrepreneurial spirituality, Hollywood. Muttering quietly in their alien tongue, Rosa and America upset Joe's fragile equilibrium and he asks them to make themselves scarce. They close the glass door and their muttering fades to the peace of the garden and the selective silence of its New Age mystics.

Rosa and America are servants who, like children in the America of old, are to be seen (when needed) and heard (if necessary or to say "Yes"). With their mistress, they form the bedrock on which this movie is built but, as said earlier, I find no mention of this in the reviews. That, I guess, is to be expected. Just as the pass-for-glass house on the hill floats above the fantasy of Hollywood, the toxic cloud of American media shrouds our globe, shaping and influencing our lives with its naive pass-for-thought emissions. Just as the child-bride and her infantile husband cannot commit to reality and each other, our neonatal baby power, convinced of an unending and unconditional supply of global goodwill, cannot commit to realities facing everyday people living everyday lives.

Am I being somewhat overzealous in highlighting Rosa and America's roles? Perhaps. I tend to do that with most things, i.e. read into them that which might not be there. But, in this instance, I think I have a pretty good case, not least the script itself and the fact that in most stories, major characters are introduced at the outset. This film introduces us at the outset to Joe's suicide-junkie sister Lucy and Sally's gynaecologist by way of phone calls, as well as to their dog Otis who, unlike Rosa and America, features prominently throughout the film. He is to the Therrians what the average moggie is to the single blogger, a repository of misplaced emotion usually reserved for real-world things like kids. In many ways, and much like the blogger's cat, the Therrians both misuse and abuse Otis. He is the catch-fence of every projected or misplaced emotion that slips from behind tightly controlled facades.


"It's married and it's the neighbor."

But let's forget the psychology and follow the story. Finishing their yoga session, Joe (the master of the house if not the East) gives it over to Rosa and America in a manner befitting domestic relationships. "It's yours," he says casually. Yes, well, it is, but only insofar as the two middle-aged Mexican servants are there to take care of Joe and Sally's needs, support their whims and follow their dictates. And only insofar, as is the case with mainstream politics, social discourse and the media, as every phrase means the opposite to people whose lives are dominated by a wealth referred to in throwaway terms. The lie of money's meaninglessness becomes evident in artistic output measured in quotas and Sally's reference to her cherished, self-styled designer house as "a big white thing on the left." In a sense, it may be the White House, although we could hardly interpret that as being left of anything. Implicit in Joe's statement, "It's yours" is that which says, "It's ours. Clean it."

A prelude to pre-party love-making is interrupted by a phone call from the Skye Davidson (Gwyneth Paltrow), the young actress portraying Sally in Joe's book and directorial debut. Sally is furious at Joe's invitation of Skye to their anniversary do and the cracks in her overstretched psyche immediately become chasms of jealousy, anger, and uncertainty. That Joe has hired and makes little secret of his desire to bed the 27-year old chosen to portray her opens gaping holes of self-doubt for Sally. Her star, like Europe's and an acquiescent world, is apparently on the wane. Nevertheless, at least this woman has the insight to doubt her worth. It will stand her in good stead as the movie progresses. Part of the script's allure is that, as we become aware of the character's obvious flaws, we grow to like them for having them. In contrast to the reviewers, my sense is that we're watching real people here, dysfunctional people twisted by forces we are able to see on-screen only because of their off-screen friendships. The Anniversary Party admits us to the inner sanctum of an extremely close circle of friends.

In the face of Skye's imminent arrival but comforted by Joe's facile pledges of undying love, any thoughts of Joe and Sally rumpling the bed are shelved as the guests start to arrive, welcomed into a foyer filled with flowers by Rosa (the rose symbolising fealty) and America. The flowers, we soon realise, are set to remain among the most neutral natural entities in this house. The cell-phone, Palm Pilot-toting Jerry Adams (John Benjamin Hickey) is the couple's business manager and it's important to note that, not only are he and his wife Judy (Parker Posey) the first to arrive; he bears the Therrians’ completed tax returns, ready for signing. Jerry is to the Therrians what Rumsfeld is to Bush and Cheney; a threat and an opportunity to further ambition by artifice and numerical cunning. As Sally and Jerry discuss pressing business matters, Judy notices the flowers and mentions them, but nobody hears her or sees them.

A rose by any name? The neighbours Ryan (Denis O'Hare) and Monica Rose (Mina Badie) are guests invited under sufferance owing to a dispute involving their dog and Otis. Ryan Rose is to Joe Therrian what John Kerry is to George W. Bush, a po-faced loser and fellow author with a chip on his shoulder. With the flowers, the servants and the dogs, the Roses form natural (awkward) but unwanted perturbations in a house where every pre-packaged, stylised item, utterance or emotion is either formally arranged for effect or frozen forever in the countless tastefully muted professional photographs covering the walls of the Therrian home). All that is natural is commoditised, be it flowers, dogs or neighbours. Cut flowers are arranged, the dogs groomed and gated, and the neighbours' tamed and cowed with threats of litigation. It is the stuff of politics and of life.

Given life by the presence of Joe's Leica-carrying former wife or lover, Gina (Jennifer Beals), who presents the Therrians yet another image of their freeze-dried love as an act of soft vengeance and an anniversary gift, the photographs carpeting the Therrians’ walls scream—like divorce-court witnesses—the couple's futile repression of issues tearing their lives apart. Gina is the Cherie Blair of Tinsel Town on the Hill, at once the artistic interloper and at all times the shrewd barrister and conniving judge of character and opportunity who frames the desperation of the Therrians’ still life in shades of black and white. Objects are vital to this movie and Sally's character fights them. Realising the frigidity of her marriage, she cannot decide where to hang the latest monument to their union, sterile but for the baby in her womb (in a sense, her neonatal personality set to bloom). Expressing their undying love and appreciation of the non-existent beauty surrounding them, Gina and Joe, still flirting after all these years, up the tempo of empty platitudes. Every exchange is reduced to "I love you..." or "I love this...," accompanied by a peck on the cheek.

Each arriving guest carries items bearing testimony to the Therrian marriage's stillborn nature and each couple carries a wholeness they lack. Sally's dissatisfied, Shakespeare-quoting co-star in her current movie, Cal (Kevin Kline), epitomises lively success as he arrives laden with gifts, kids, diaper changes and his self-declared wife, Sophia (Phoebe Cates). Like the servants, flowers, and neighbours, other people's kids are relegated to seeming irrelevance. Dispatched to the guest room, they offer telling signifiers unseen by self-important major players lacking the wisdom of childhood. Sally's creative but neurotic director and professional anchor, Mac (John C. Reilly), arrives with his delightfully self-destructive, anorexic wife Clair (Jane Adams), three video cameras, a firm grip on the dog and a tenuous hold on reality. He obviously lives for his movies. Mac and Cal make up the Hollywood neo-cons, think-tankers, and campaign managers, the makers and breakers of careers, trends, and insiders. They dictate who is to bless and who is to blame, out the unwary and exact revenge on those who fail them.

And ultimately, Sally's soul mate and friend, the single, violin-playing Peter Sellers look-alike and mimic Levi Panes (Michael Panes), pitches up. Panes turns out to be more a self-serving facade than a confidante of substance. He is a neat reminder that the Therrians’ anniversary party can be juxtaposed with The Party so well trashed by the late, great Peter Sellers. Panes is the Karl Rove of Sally's life and a constant reminder that, as the Therrians gather a slice of white America to itself to watch its edges curl, The Party and Hrundi V. Bakshi will always belong to 1968, Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards. The Anniversary Party is unquestionably now. Whereas in The Party Sellers, with impeccable timing and ineffable grace, plays an awkward outsider wreaking histrionic havoc, the characters filling the Therrians’ designer lives play intimate insiders bringing down, through deliciously uncomfortable silences, mistimed outbursts and ringing irony, a chaos of perfection's making. Through all this, Sally and Joe play host to different manifestations of their own fractured selves, slipping and sliding in the vacillation of their indecision.

At times, the obvious skill needed to pull off this seamless integration of ruptured lives, emotional schisms, and broken dreams puts even Sellers's comic genius in the shade. To juxtapose the two movies so obviously and so unselfconsciously calls for supreme confidence, a confidence Jason Leigh and Cumming obviously have in each other and the friends they direct. Besides shredding the paternalistic master-slave relationship and notions of success, The Anniversary Party dissects marriage with a scything but gentle mirth. Despite finding most relationships wanting, it leaves one wanting more relationships. The more unreal these people get, the more real they become.


"So how much do you hate her?" "Big time."

As the guests arrive, America dispenses wine to each, ensuring (like all good Mexicans, Koreans, Filipinos, A-rabs, nigras and the like) she gets a bit on the side each time. Funny thing about America; she's always close to the action. She certainly is when Skye Davidson, who drops into this mix of identities as transparent as the large windows framing the house, embarrasses Sally by gushing her adoration and Sally's status as a fading star in front of the mute servants in the kitchen. The nubile Skye carries all the physical attributes Sally has seen fade to skeletal angularity and none of the intelligence evident in the self-doubter's thoughts and actions. Skye is much like the Charlize Therons of today, an intelligent woman you'd want to fuck as a prelude to intelligent conversation. Skye is the ultimate commodity; unthinking pleasure on a stick, the wet bed of the American Dream. Her feigned naivety fools no-one, but her shrewd intelligence makes her conquest the more desirable. Who does not want the U.S. spread out before them, offering them eternal sensual bliss?

Sally, on the other hand, epitomises the Streeps and Fosters of yesteryear, people I'd choose to have a damned good conversation with before getting down to more fundamental pleasures. In her insecurity, which is strangely devoid of any panic-stricken neurosis, she retains an air of "the strong woman", the one person others can count on to pull it all together. Joe? He's a likeable but effeminate tosser, a complete hoser, a six-year old wastrel in a 'Boy' sweatshirt incapable of commitment to anything but his selfish desires. Having nothing to give, he takes, constantly raising the question, "How the hell did these two end up together?" A professional relationship carried too far, obviously. But it doesn't matter. Life generally throws us into the weirdest relationships, leaving us to wonder at what might have happened had we any say in the matter.

Joe's intellectual and personal nemesis and antithesis is Ryan Rose, his next-door neighbour, the uptight, bitter dry-drunk and prolific author who, in choosing to remain an observer throughout the movie, sets himself beyond the pale and offers a counterpoint to the hedonism on which Joe thrives. Ryan, who abhors others' self-indulgence with the passion of a convert, straitjackets himself in sterility. Yet, in his selfishness, there is a certain, deliberate logic. If he is to survive, he cannot revert to a lifestyle he has obviously enjoyed or been sucked into in the past.

I must say, I sympathise with this guy's anger and frustration. An absolute asshole of his own creation, he's doomed to watch others indulge themselves. As a husband and father, I understand his apoplexy absolutely. It just ain't fair, Bubba, but if you want what you've got, you'd better learn to live with it or you'll explode. If Ryan offers a counterweight carefully crafted to balance or highlight other's deficiencies, he does so brilliantly and brings essential foibles to the mix. His wife Monica, however, suffers the brunt of his coat-hanger rectitude and self-righteous inflexibility and, when the movie takes off, cannot resist falling into experiencing the upside of a lifestyle lived on the downside.


"Isn't Skye amazing?" "She's got great tits."

This film might have been shot in under three weeks and its script written on the run, but nobody will convince me the original screenplay had not been lying around a long time. The balance, structure, and craftsmanship evident in the story line is too good for an off-the-cuff, impromptu performance by a dozen or so talented individuals. The dialogue is sharp, witty and pointedly ironic throughout. "I've been watching your films since I was a little girl ... I've seen all your movies. When I was in rehab, the second time, they wouldn't even let us see your drug addict movie. They said you were too real. I worship you. And I couldn't be more flattered, because I know the part I'm playing in Joe's movie is based on you as a young woman," gushes bimbo Skye, darkening Sally's kitchen-sink mood. It is up to America to break the ugliness of the moment by wheeling in the cake marking the moment; a cake topped by three separate and edible photographs of the Therrians and their dog.

Much like Adaptation, this movie takes off only once the scene has been well and truly set. And perhaps, also like Adaptation, this is where most so-called reviewers part company with its promised excellence, missing the exposure of the rot corrupting those involved. Skye, having arrived and conquered, and after shaming Sally to silence and a passive-aggressive counter-attack, is the thoughtless but sensual point around which the film revolves. She proffers—after an embarrassing-but-clever-yet-uncomfortable set of necessary party games (Charades, naturally), her gift, a supply of Ecstasy to a communion party trimmed down to those prepared to bare their minds, bodies and souls.

Ecstasy becomes a misnomer as every suppressed passion explodes with the delicacy of a thousand volcanoes. With the onset of its effects, clothes come off, the swimming pool becomes a centrepiece, and personas peel like old paint. Sally's director Mac bewails his female lead's inability to act; friend Sophia aligns herself with Sally's pregnancy, distrust of Gina and assessment of Joe as "...narcissistic, irresponsible and unreliable"; Ryan becomes ever more awkward; Joe admires the studiously unselfconscious Skye's breasts, Clair glides nakedly from neurosis to neurosis, and Sally, out looking for her dog (missing because Monica has left open more than a subliminal gate), catches her giving herself unreservedly to Joe. Sally’s handling of the situation hints at the movie's brilliance. Her deepseated anger, evident only through her refusal to react, promises violence.

The script moves swiftly from passion to crucifixion as Joe, Sally, Panes and Skye head in pairs up the canyon above the city of dreams to look for the dog. Again, as with everything in the script, the left foot does not move unless the right follows. Panes and Skye, essential foils to the phobias of Sally and Joe respectively, form a possible alternative or complementary relationship and follow their upward path separately to the Therrians. Sally and Joe, left together for the first time, use their hilltop hike to thrash out their differences and vent their frustrations. They tear into each other like drug-crazed rats.

In keeping with the dark, bleak, but often excruciatingly funny humour pervading the film, we cut away from the two lovebirds unleashing their anger and enmity on each other. Back at the house, the camera focuses on Ryan who remains as oblivious to the Therrian's difficulties as he does to his wife's attempt at rebellious infidelity. Uncompromisingly and without feeling, Ryan is in the kitchen grilling America and Rosa (always present when the film takes a twist) about building permits. Like their owners, the slaves are taking heat. In their alien-tongued obduracy however, they tell the dry drunk to piss off just as Monica rushes in and, filled with a zest for life fuelled by her newly unbridled passion, tells him to get off his ass to look for that which he hates most in life, the Therrian's dog.

Back up on the hill, Sally and Joe's conversation spirals through a detailed litany of each character's real or perceived failings, all of which we have seen on-screen. The sense of a building acrimony is palpable and it's topped by Sally's sudden realisation that she must end her marriage and end it immediately if she is to save herself. She bluntly states that she has had an abortion, a saving lie that puts her cards irrevocably on the table. She is finished with her self-indulgent, self-pitying toy-boy husband. In Sally, one of few characters with any spine, we see a woman fighting her subservient self-image, the House & Garden woman who should, because she has it all, be ever mindful of her place. Fortunately, Sally has heart and passion and, in keeping with the emerging theme of La Rosa Mystica, uses her beauty and thorns to see off those who leech off her soul. It is she, of all the film's protagonists, who will flower most obviously when the storm fades away.

As with Sally and Joe's hillside confrontation, the glass walls cocooning The Anniversary Party and our public world seal the unspoken truths of decades. Today, they crack to breaking. And just as Joe's every childish whim has been catered to at unspeakable cost, the United States' jackbooted march across the globe has imbued in those of us living outside it a silent but lethal enmity. Perhaps, to Americans, we are all Spanish, Arab, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Filipino, Asian, Korean, Chinese—inscrutable aliens-cum-servants of the Greater American Good, to be taken at face value and ignored once used. The United States forgets to whom it owes its dues, the world at large. And it is a world tired of much ado about nothing and the perennial passion play amounting to a meagre pretence at foreign aid.

We too want out.


"You have to sign your taxes anyway."

Back at the movies and following the Biblical theme, we are taken back to the baptismal fount, the swimming pool where Mac, Sally's director, choreographs naked nymphs in an underwater ballet. Mac is a wonderfully complex and paradoxically warm-hearted Machiavelli, one of the few sane weirdoes present. Under the influence of the E, he swallows water, drowns, and is brought back to consciousness by Jerry, the accountant, who knows how to balance the books. Mac realises Sally's acting failure is his and his alone and he is left to face his demons in tears. Compounding the rain of disaster (while newborn hero Jerry and his wife get it on), girlfriend Gina takes a call from Joe's father who tells her Joe's sister Lucy has taken an overdose.

Joe, Sally, Skye and Panes return dog-less to the house and the news of Lucy's OD; Sally takes charge and Joe falls apart. She allows him to crash and sees off her co-star Cal, his wife Sophia, and their kids before walking in on Skye and Panes screwing each other's brains out (or consummating Sally and Joe's relationship, if you will). Just as the movie started with Sally and Joe's interrupted lovemaking being evident in an untrammeled bed, Pane and Skye's passion is obvious in the tangled covers at its close. Once the dust settles on the carnage remaining at the credits, the dumb blonde, unaware of her role in exposing fraudulent lives she is set to emulate, starts clearing the debris from the tables. "You don't need to do that," says Sally. "I don't mind," smiles the cluster-bomb Madonna. "Relax. You've done enough," stresses the more mature woman with determination and a full and healthy appreciation of Skye.

The movie, a mélange of shifting scenes, can’t be spoiled by any description of it. The timing, dialogue and 'balancing' themes are too good. The walls adorned with dead photographs are replaced, in the guest room, with walls covered by children's pictures.

Ultimately, with Joe set to head off alone to London and his sister's sickbed, we are left with the couple and their unsigned tax returns. This is the scene that prompted my attempt to dissect the film. Lacking a graphic memory, I do not remember it clearly but I do know that I saw it. It is a Kodak moment that allows us a simultaneous glimpse of the American dream and its reality. Joe and Sally sign off their tax returns and each other under a sign or plaque imploring "God Bless America." God does indeed bless America but, in life as in The Anniversary Party, it is we outsiders who take the role of America. As dysfunctional adolescents in a world of jaded cynics who tolerate their kids without sanction, it is to 'America the world' that the United States, if it is to eat, will ultimately have to answer.

As Joe and Sally make love for the last time, America and Rosa sweep up the mess. It is their job and their lot. The party is over. Joe leaves, Sally sweeps their wedding rings into a drawer, puts the house on the market, and the dog returns. Shot of her husband, Sally is free to discover her life and herself. The people who filled this movie with cut-glass egos and paper-thin personas have gone. And yet, out here in the so-called real world, they are still with us. Be they movie stars or politicians, they are the mass-market personalities created by the media that give us FOXNews, CNN, CBS, and USA Today. They are, and are of, the media. Is it any wonder they believe their own lies? It is they, after all, who script the fictions that pass as truths for all occupying the cocoon of cosseted privilege.

It is difficult for me to believe that reviewers can, in seriousness, tout this film as a reflection of Jason Leigh and Cumming's movie-star realities. Seeing it as clearly as they do, why would they ever want to live it? Set against Blake Edwards' 1968 movie, The Anniversary Party is as cuttingly funny as Sellers' is slapstick adept. The script, acting and use of digi-cams show how rapidly scriptwriting and film-making have matured in thirty years and, as a whole, it shows that movies have a future even, if like their country of origin, most opt for a mediocrity that highlights its finely crafted brilliance.

Would that Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming and friends be charged with scripting our global future. They'd do a damned side better job of it than the boys in the Jesus Bunker.

Sharon 'Opens the Gates of Hell'

We wish to speedily advance implementation of the Roadmap towards quiet and a genuine peace. We hope that the Palestinian Authority will carry out its part. However, if in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the Roadmap - then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians.

Ariel Sharon December 2003

Many who analysed the Butcher of Shatila's December 2003 Herzliya commitment to his so-called Disengagement Plan, unveiled after his trashing of the Washington-sponsored Roadmap, speculated he might, in the light of the U.S. presidential elections and the ongoing Iraqi Occupation, attempt Yasir Arafat's murder around February of this year. They were close. The Governor of Israel's murder earlier today of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin endangers all living in Israel and Palestine and destroys any medium-term prospect of a negotiated truce or long-term peaceful settlement. Israel has unilaterally made it impossible to implement an apartheid two-state solution to the crisis in Palestine. It must now accept that a greater, democratic Palestine in which Israel is brought together with the millions of dispossessed refugees incarcerated in the Gaza and West Bank concentration camps, is the only viable alternative to Sharon's ongoing genocide; and is inevitable. Given the climate of terror fostered by Sharon, it is not unlikely that Hamas which, under Sheik Yassin, has shunned cooperation with other Islamic resistance movements, might look to cooperating with the rest of the Arab world in seeking an end to Israel's reign of terror in the Occupied Territories. Hamas’s Qassam Brigade and Palestine's Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have not yet delivered a like response to Yassin's assassination.

Note Gordon Coale offers some good links, from Helena Cobban of Just World News to Uri Avnery at Counterpunch.

Adaptation

Of Passions, Kings and Orchid Thieves

Where time is a memory...



Maybe the ghost orchid only blooms in the minds of people who've walked too long in the swamp. Susan Orlean

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood | When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud | I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I'm lugging several books around with me. Having revisited Conrad and Eliot in January, I moved on (or should that be "back") to Camus and Sartre. Sometimes, it's necessary to retrace your steps if you're to see where you're headed. I've trawled The Rebel, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom, enjoying all three—even though I recognise them as old friends; mirrors on a wall. Afterwards, I felt something to be missing. Y'know the feeling... heh. So I moved across to Sartre's Words (I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it...), distancing myself from any association with the horrible little man's subtitle... of course.

On the Powell's site, Words is accompanied by an extract from Paul de Man's 1964 review of it, published in The New York Review of Books. The review is open to only those prepared to pay for it. Who said irony is dead? Anyway, I read the Sartre because he and Camus will forever be linked. I do not (as mentioned in a post below) pretend to understand or empathise with the philosophers, but I find the meaning in statements such as Sartre's "Hell is other people" in stories like Camus's The Guest (the other telling story in that particular anthology being the first, The Adulterous Woman).


"Boy, I'd love to find a portal into your brain." Valerie

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured | I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word | In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Still I was restless...

...and so took Milan Kundera's The Joke from the shelf. I think I've found what I'm looking for. I'm feeling more settled than I have in a long time. This edition has a foreword by the author in which he mentions the book's first publication in Paris with a foreword by Louis Aragon. I do not know the surrealists but have clung, since finding it last year, to the beauty of Aragon's short explanation of their form, A Wave of Dreams:

Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams extends further at each step. Dreams, dreams, dreams, the blue sun of dreams at last drives the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dreams, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the figures of happiness, on the sobs of attention, on the signals of hope, in the yards where a people resign themselves to serving pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and the barking dogs go out into the road. O great Dream, in the pale morning of buildings, don't be led off again by the first sophisms of dawn, those chalk cornices where, leaning over, you mingle your pure, weak strokes with the miraculous immobility of the Statues! Scatter these intolerable clarities, these bleedings of heaven that for too long have bespattered my eyes. Your bedroom slipper is in my hair, genie with the smoky face, stunning shadow coiled up in my breath. Take over the rest of my life, take over all lives, tide rising with a foam of flowers. Omens above the houses, visions at the bottom of pools of ink and in the coffee-grounds, migrations of birds on the laterality of soothsayers, hearts consulted by bloody fingers, announce-the times unwrap themselves from their draperies-your reign and your cyclone, adorable siren, incomparable clown of the caverns, o vision leaning back on the coral, color of falls, odor of the wind! more...

Yeah... rest easy, Allen Ginsberg, great voice of the darkling night.

I guess life is more about memory and forgetting than anything else. If memory serves me at all, Kundera wrote about this best in Immortality, wherein a poolside gesture by a woman named Agnes drives his reflections on passion and desire. But for me, now, most things have to do with Ludvic's insight while walking along the banks of the Ostrava:

"I was well aware that the nightmarish phantasmagoria of the landscape was merely a metaphor for everything I had tried not to recall after my encounter with Lucie; I seemed to be projecting suppressed memories onto everything I saw around me; the desolation of the fields and courtyards and warehouses, the murk of the river, and the pervasive chill that gave the landscape its unity. But I understood there was no escaping those memories; they were all around me."

Ever had that feeling? That realisation of your projection? It's decidedly weird, almost hallucinogenic. I project a great deal, but then I get Meryl Streep to act things out for me.


"You are what you love, not what loves you." Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved | Everything up to that point had been left unresolved. | Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Last week, Wendy and I watched Adaptation on the box. Based on Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, which I have not read, I found it fascinating. Orlean developed the book from her 1995 article in The New Yorker, Orchid Fever, a piece that hints at far more than orchid-collector John Laroche's eccentric obsessions. A film is what you make of it and perhaps I make too much of this one. Be that as it may, I reckon David Denby's New Yorker review is a bucket of shite. He ends his critique thus:

But the distraught Charlie, to our amazement, is impressed by McKee's platitudes, and abruptly turns the orchid story into a violent melodrama after all. What then envelops Orlean and Laroche and Charlie (who writes himself into the story) is awful nonsense. Drugs, guns, car crashes, alligators—the movie becomes a complete shambles, and far more desperate than anything conventional filmmakers would fall into. It's hard to know how to read this mess of an ending. Is it a way of throwing in the towel after a long struggle and "adapting" to Hollywood? Or is it meant to be taken as a savage parody of selling out? The first possibility is sad, the second condescending to the audience. The trouble with experimental comedies is that it's often impossible to figure out how to end them. But at least this one is intricate fun before it blows itself up.

Crap. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time and, as time goes on, it gets even better. As I've said, I've not read Orlean's book and had not read Orchid Fever until starting this blog entry.

I came to the movie cold, expecting that which the blurb gave me, insight into the fucked-up lives of orchid collectors, a demented species of horticulturists, adventurers, crooks, smugglers, deviants and seed gatherers of an exotic type. I also expected to learn something of the plants. Orlean doesn't tell us much about orchids, epitomised by the elusive Ghost Orchid (polyrrhiza lindenii). The Ghost Orchid, in its role as the Holy Grail, is both the star and the villain of the piece.

The people tracking these elusive plants in Governor Jeb Bush's state of oppressive heat and tropical dis-ease are decidedly twisted but, just as Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had little to do with desert-bike races, high-octane drugs and crew-cut police conventions and everything to do with Dr. Johnson's quote prefacing it, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," Adaptation has little to say of the plant and its latter-day hunter gatherers and much to say of the greater collector, i.e. people—whoever and wherever they may be. It is not only the John Laroches (Chris Cooper) who get to inherit the Earth. We too are "other people".


"Cut it down, Russell." John Laroche

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, | Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, | Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Adaptation is a love story. What else? What else works? Nothing. It had to be a love story, but it's an intelligent love story, where self-absorption, passion and obsession dominate a love relegated to fleeting moments of unseen beauty deep in the Fakahatchee swamps and its characters' strangled hearts. It's intelligent because, through the shambles of its evolution, it retains the strength and thrust of its frequently misguided human intensity.

It's not the usual love story because it has to do with one person, the viewer. No, not the stars nor even the abiding presence of that elusive state of delicate completion, the Ghost Orchid. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), the scriptwriter from hell who eventually gets it and the girl, Laroche the toothless swamp-monkey, orchid devourer and main love interest, and Orlean, the fucked-up, repressed writer whose inability to express herself blows the movie to its conclusion are bit players, scrambling for their scattered lives.

In Adaptation, Orlean tells the story of her love-lost life. Okay, what the hell is passion? What is obsession? What is lust? I don't know, but I do know they're linked. We need all three and it's sometimes bloody difficult to tell them apart. To do so takes an insight and self-awareness that cannot descend into any of them. Lacking passion, Orlean certainly can't help herself falling into it. Bored and over-privileged (working for The New Yorker helps), she heads off—without a suitcase full of drugs and bats outside of Barstow—to find fulfilment in her character's opposite (Laroche), a cranked orchid collector with a bad case of life. As portrayed, Orlean (awareness) and Laroche (passion) are one-dimensional characters in dire need of each other if they are to realise themselves. "There you go. We're twins" says Orlean. Once plugged into the toothless obsessive, she definitely wants more and sets about rearranging everybody's psyches.

Laroche is a compulsive dilettante who flits—much like the insects that pollinate his flowers—from one interest to another. His saving grace is that, unlike Orlean, he's been whacked by tragedy to an acceptance of life as it presents itself to him. He therefore moves comfortably from one passion fest to another. But he lacks awareness or a sense of his quests. Orlean, aware of her sterility but as oblivious to others' needs or shortcomings as Laroche, is fascinated by the serial loser determined to crack the big time (cloning the rare Ghost Orchid) and life in general. But she tries, as he observes, to ride his passion to her fulfilment.

A normal person stuck in a rut where passion is another country and her husband has become a drag, she is desperate to claim a thoughtless zest for life similar to Laroche's. Her chief flaw is to see more in the flower hunter (he reminds me of John Fowles's The Collector) than a low-rent horticulturist or pointing finger. Before looking at herself, Orlean takes Laroche for the real deal, a toothless flower guru capable of cloning a million Nirvanas, and sets herself up to take a fall as hard as any Laroche has experienced. Orlean's redemptive potential lies in her intuitive grasp of Laroche's dumb acceptance of our need to seek a coming into being as magnificent as that of the Ghost Orchid, which flowers once in a blue moon.


"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?" Robert Mckee

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there | With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. | She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

That's where the story might have ended. However, movie rights to Orlean's book result in the obsessively neurotic Charlie 'Being John Malkovitch' Kaufman being assigned to script it. Kaufman, charged with translating a passion for flowers to the screen, tries to mirror Orlean's written reflection of an indeterminate inner reality. With a writer's integrity, naked authenticity and indomitable will (and without contacting Orlean and Laroche), Kaufman immediately spends half the film screwing his anxieties into a box with his brash but generally likeable alter ego, his lame-brain twin brother Donald. "Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote Casablanca were twins," writing lecturer Peter Mckee tells Charlie, who is torn between himself and himself.

They weren't twins, of course. But then, neither are Charlie and Donald.

Kaufman's insertion of himself into the movie as a third, composite character—containing attributes common to both Orlean and Laroche—is a twist of genius. It doesn't show immediately. He gets nothing done fast and grows desperate just as quickly. His quest, seemingly altogether different from Orlean's or Laroche's, is no different to theirs. All three seek the Holy Grail, the fleeting purity of the Ghost Orchid. At least Charlie is honest. His desperation is obvious and, dragging his shadow behind him, he's as selfish as all hell.

To break the impasse—his inability to script Orlean's story (a fiction), Kaufman throws the three characters together for the second half of the movie and all hell breaks lose. This is a funny film, and Streep is a funny lady. "We'll have to kill him," she says, speaking to Laroche of Charlie when the latter discovers the lady and the tramp deciding to settle for lust.

Yeah, well, once Charlie, his brother Donald, Orlean and Laroche finish with each other, two characters are history and the other two indulge in some serious soul-searching. Cineplex idiots (for example, The New Yorker's David Denby) might find the going difficult when the movie takes off as it appears to descend into farce. It does not. Instead, it becomes a black-humoured journey to the heart of darkness and "the way things are around here", the end of the road for Laroche and, for Orlean, disillusionment and a return to the beat at The New Yorker. For a newly integrated, invigorated Charlie Kaufman, there is a brief flowering of the Ghost Orchid in a promise of some reciprocal sex and, who knows... perhaps love.


"I'm probably the smartest person I know." John Laroche

Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost | I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed. | Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Laroche loved orchids but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as he loved the orchids themselves. Susan Orlean

The Ghost Orchid (Holy Grail, choices not taken, possible futures left unmade, or that for which we invariably long) retains its form throughout the film—even as it morphs during the second half in and out of the characters and they in and out of it. In having arrived at a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of its beauty, it has reached the taunting stasis of perfection. Hence our desire to possess it and, given our vile natures, kill it. Herein lies a delicious irony. The movie's characters, fictions of real people we take as being true, contrast sharply with the Ghost Orchid, a flower of which little is said but which we immediately endow with as much myth and mysticism as we have in us. Why? Because its perceived beauty and sexual significance mock our messy humanity.

It's only through neurotics, frauds and failures like Charlie Kaufman and ourselves and through realising the ultimate sterility and lifelessness of the Ghost Orchid itself that we come to understand that there is no redemption in perfection. Like our gods, we either adapt or we die. Ultimately, with death always answering life's immutability, both come together.

What's the message? I dunno... Can you realise yourself without other people? I guess… if you realise yourself in them. I guess too, the thing is to maintain the tension between our competing selves, between passion and obsession, ecstasy and boredom, fantasy and reality, being and nothingness. Yeah... in so many ways, this film is about the boundaries or limits we either do or do not set for ourselves. Charlie is all about boundaries and confining himself to them, so much so that, twisted with angst, he explodes into his doppelganger before finding himself a mix of the two. Laroche knows no boundaries and pays the price through social and legal boundaries imposed on him.

Orlean is the writer, the boundary rider. Knowing they're out there, but not having set hers appropriately, she explores the unknown and, in doing so, takes a fall but lives to tell the tale and mend fences.


"We have to kill him." Susan Orlean

Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount | But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts | And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

We all have our desired Ghost Orchids and, damn it, we need them. I'm all for orchids. But the stronger our passions, the more we project them and the larger our shopping baskets become. Sometimes, we're given opportunity to fill them. But I sometimes find myself hoping that, if confronted by one of my Ghost Orchids, I'd duck and run. Well, maybe not run; I'll just play things cool... thinking things through, you understand. Either way, there was no way Orlean should've opted for an affair with Laroche. She dropped her husband like a sack of shit and without explanation.

Orchids, perhaps of different species and types, can be grown, but they demand care and nurturing. A potential for love, fuelled by passion, is always unlikely to amount to much more than sex. Should it in fact be love, a love laid bare can tear the stars from the sky and render our and other loves meaningless. Common sense and a modicum of intelligence should tell one that messing with passion is a dangerous thing. It's the force that through the green fuse drives the flower and is sacred. Orlean and Laroche mess too easily with its power. We're not speaking self-castration here either. Restraint has become an altogether too uncommon word.

Nowhere is this more evident in the movie than in the mixing of Orlean's and Laroche's chemistries. He becomes her Ghost Orchid, she his collector. By plucking him from his natural habitat, she destroys him and a part of herself. And the scriptwriter gets the girl. An infinitely better alternative. Yup... were I given the chance to find that orchid, I'd probably step back... for all the right reasons, of course. Left untouched, unblemished and forever unreal, it remains out there and, in memory, always in bloom. Were I to change that (no matter the reality—even if dormant or dead, it lives), it'd surely die in me and, for the flower or myself, what would remain? It's a bastard, but I prefer the quiet life.

Passion is not a choice; it is a curse. I'd rather die on the road to Jerusalem or Camelot, or live forever at the edge of the lake than watch an orchid wilt.


"I'm sorry I have to do this, dude." John Laroche

I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove | And old men with broken teeth stranded without love. | Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn? | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Passions? Having ridden them to ground, we are all crucified on our passions. I'd rather have Susan Orlean and Meryl Streep tell me that than an asshole like Mel Gibson. Given their chosen subjects and their treatment of them, I reckon Orlean has, for better or worse, a far greater appreciation of religion and humanity than does Gibson. The God from Down Under is a fucking bore, another God killer. After reading several good articles on his film, I took the matter to Father Christopher.

For those who know me, this will come as no surprise. Father Christopher, my mentor and spiritual advisor, is well acquainted with orchids, gods, and sins of the flesh. He sees angels too, but we won't go into that now. The last time I brought it up, he beat me about the head with a stolen mitre and sprayed mace into my eyes. "You fucking amoeba," he screamed, "What the hell do you know of angels?"

Nothing, I suppose, so I left it at that. On gods, orchids and sins of the flesh, though, he is more forthcoming.

"Some think I'm a fucking misogynist," he giggled.

"I wonder why," I sneered.

"You little shit," he retorted. "They don't understand me."

"For once," I agreed, "You may have a point."

They say a prophet remains unrecognized in his own country. Well, somebody said it... But I'm no Boulder-ite and can recognize a prophet at thirty paces. And I can state, with a straight face and without equivocation, that I reckon Father Christopher has nothing but the utmost respect for people, whatever their sex, gender or proclivity. Why? Because he has known and overcome evil. More than that, he continues—despite insuperable odds (himself)—his quest to hunt down his Ghost Orchid.

I hope he never finds it.

We were spraying plants in the orchid house while Brother Marek squeezed potatoes into bottles outside in the rain. "So what's his buzz?" I asked, nodding in the direction of Gibson, crucified to the main gate of the perimeter fence surrounding the Jesus Bunker.

Father Christopher's face grew dark. "I found him breaking into the orchid house. We had a little chat."

"Eh?"

"Eh... what?"

"About what?"

"About why he'd want to pinch my orchids."

"And?"

And what?" People grow decidedly testy when it comes to discussing God or orchids.

"And what was the result of your bloody conversation?"

"He crucified himself to the gate." Father Christopher snickered. "But I just ignore him. He thinks he can take everyone along for the ride, poor sap. But it's his trip and his trip alone."

"You sure about that?"

"Well, yes. Besides a small amount of psilocybin. But that was only to loosen his tongue."

"And?"

"Like everybody, he spoke a lot of crap. His is what one might call a futile passion."

We could see Brother Marek finishing his work. After slipping three bottles into his pocket, he called the dogs and headed for the perimeter gate, passing Gibson on the way out. He threw him a bone.

"Peekaboo, Mel. I'm going out to exercise my anguish."

Gibson groaned. Fake blood seeped from his mouth.

Brother Marek stopped. He turned slowly to stare at the figure crucified to the gate of the perimeter fence. He shivered. The sky grew dark and the rain turned to a scarlet mist. Marek's eyes narrowed angrily. Father Christopher and I could hear the strains of Lord Randall drift in on a quickening wind.

"What did you say, Mel?"

"I asked God to forgive you," mumbled the Australian millionaire.

We barely saw the bottle pass from the pocket of Brother Marek's cossack to his hand. It arced through the rain and exploded to a shower of fireworks against Gibson's head.

Marek was angry.

"You want me forgiven, Mel? Hey, fuck, who killed God, Mel? You killed God, Mel. And you're still doing it, you sick fuck. You're doing it over and over again in cinemas around the world. And you're doing so in a vile and disgusting manner, you crass boor. Hey, look, no blame, we understand that. The King is dead, Mel, long live the King... It was ever thus."

Marek gathered himself and turned as if to walk away. He paused, turned back, and then marched on Gibson's spread-eagled figure.

"But why choose God, Mel? Have you no fucking self-respect? No self-esteem?"

He stepped back. He was shaking with rage. He moved forward quickly, slapping Gibson across the face, one, two, three times. And once more for luck.

"And now that you're killing Him, Mel, can you stop doing it? Are you sure He's going to live forever now that you've laid your grubby hands on Him? Nah, you can't, can you, because to you God's a collector's item, a fucking Florida orchid you hope will survive. You have to carry on killing him, don't you, Mel? Why? Because to you there is nothing but the violence, the brutality, and the gore. Why's that Mel? Because you're an orchid collector, Mel, that's why. You come like a thief in the night."

Marek spat on the ground. "You can kill your God as often as you like, but even a dumb bastard like you knows that you haven't the power to raise Him from the dead."

Lightening flickered in the East, illuminating a crucifix against the sky. In the far distance, a wildcat growled. The drumbeat hooves of four approaching riders sounded against a wind that began to howl.

Brother Marek appeared tired but content. He turned from the figure on the fence. "For an orchid thief, Mel, you're a dumb sap. Now that you've killed your God, you have nothing left. And I have nothing to say to you."

I turned to Father Christopher and smiled. "He's okay, that Brother Marek. I always did like him. Is he going to fetch the girls now?"

"Yes," answered Father Christopher quietly, a particular flower on his mind. "It grows only in the Andes, you know." He walked to the window, tracing a shadow on its pane.


"I just wanted. That's all." Susan Orlean

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes | I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose. | I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

In his preface to The Joke, Kundera writes:

If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called The Ride of the Kings: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium.

It is in this equilibrium that we find our Ghost Orchid, not crucified but suspended. "Since the ghost orchid's roots blend so well with the tree bark, the striking white flower looks as if it is suspended in midair."

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera's character Mirek says: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This observation became little more than a fashionable aphorism, but it has always stayed with me. My struggle is not so much against forgetting as it is against what, why, how and, perhaps, who I choose to remember. Just as it is easy to confuse passion, obsession and lust, it is all too easy to confuse remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism with their cousins, remorseless nostalgia and remorseful skepticism.

Perhaps that's why, with Camus's haunting words and visions absorbed, I have orchids and fences on my mind... a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of beauty and the possible attainment of a static and perfect peace. Ah well, screw that... I gotta go. The Union Central's pullin' out and the orchids are in bloom. I've only got me one good shirt left and it smells of stale perfume.

And there be orchids out there...

We're all one thing, Lieutenant. That's what I've come to realize. Like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

Cassie — The 3 | Screenplay by Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line | Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine. | If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Dedication

In retrospect, to the Orchid Lady of Blogaria. Sometimes, I really wonder why I do this stuff. Reading others who've been there and done that is so much easier. I've not scoured my blogroll for a while now but, in considering a post explaining the very real differences between the Jesus Bunker in Boulder and that in Washington D.C. (it is quite a story and is highlighted by juxtaposing a year-old and a current post), I started trawling my blogroll. I immediately stumbled on Shelley's stunning page of orchid posts, as well as her entry of March 14, Sometimes We Have to Shout.

Yeah, indeed, the orchids are in bloom. I'll not be seeing Gibson's movie for very much the same reasons, Shell, and can't for the life of me see why sane people are attracted to it. Mind you... perhaps I can. It is apparently a dull movie, poorly made. My gripe with Gibson stems from my own Catholicism which, as I understand it, espouses tolerance and a 'celebratory' life lived by example in the awareness of the value we give to each other. Because of this, I'm angered by Gibson's fundamentalist evangelism in an age of expedient death and relative absolutes. Like it or not, religion (which, properly used, can lead to faith) is essentially a private matter lived for all.

I doubt Mad Mel acknowledges Muslims, Jews, Hindis, Pagans or anybody else as having an equal hold on that which matters to us most. Yet, Christianity professes to give all, a priori, a shot at Nirvana. To loose his cheap Passion into a world at war with itself is divisive and contrary to any notion of collective suffering and reconciliation. Christ, whether one interprets His existence literally or spiritually, suffered as a human being (and, to do that, was probably no saint). As far as I know, He did not suffer a victim complex. At a deeper level, we cannot begin to understand the contradictory truths underlying His existence. All we know is that His story has been a part of us since long before the Old Testament was written. It is an ‘old story’ going back way further than Isis, Osiris and Horus.

A person cannot be God and God cannot be a person (bar Christ), yet we all have God in us. So His birth, life, death and resurrection remain what Father Christopher refers to as 'an Eternal Mystery'. "It's no mystery," argues Brother Marek. "It's good marketing." Well, whatever, I guess that's where faith and the Sacraments comes in.

Anyway, His taking on the suffering of all of us is the message of His Passion; not his crucifixion. For God's sake, capital punishment ensures that people are crucified every other day in the United States. U.S. foreign policy crucifies millions all the time. Given that such premeditated murders are supported by most (who take this movie literally, thereby reinforcing the contradiction), what's the big deal with one man's suffering? Unless, of course, we understand that we are murdering God in every instance.

Christianity differs from other religions currently in vogue in that it offers Resurrection, something Gibson fails to address. It would be bad for the box office and bad for his pocket. It might also cheer him up and unglue his pre-Vatican II mentality, but I don't think he wants that. Christ crucified tells us one thing: life is tough. Accept it and deal with it. I accept his sincerity, but Gibson is not dealing with it. Christ’s pain is his pain. One thing that people like Gibson (or those flocking to his movie) don’t seem to understand is that it works both ways. He shouldn’t, in my view, offload his anguish onto people who have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. There’s enough death and double-dealing around. Life doesn't get better, but it does get easier, if only in death. Heaven is, after all, full of orchids (and, of course, for some of us, vestal virgins to go).

More importantly, the Gibson’s of this world fail to live in the knowledge that they could be dead wrong. Religion is a crutch, but that does not detract from its value in a world of cripples. Used as a stick to beat others though, it’s reprehensible and yet another blot on the copybook of Catholicism as interpreted by people like Gibson. Many twisted people are good Catholics, but they remain twisted people and it’s on that mundane, in-the-world level that I judge (rather than condemn) them and their facile evangelism.

Implicit in the sanctity of life is an acknowledgement of death as that which we most fear, i.e. the end. That's where our frail faith steps in. And that’s why, as people of any belief, we abhor wilful death. As I understand it, Judaism has a far better grasp of this. It’s all about G_d. That reverence (not fear), unquestioning acceptance of our inability to comprehend that which is beyond us, and firm grasp of our place in the disorder of things is something I relate to and respect. People who reduce God (however they understand or do not care to understand Him or Her) to the idiot next door or the one inside their own skin piss me off. They make death and destruction so much easier to perpetrate and so much more difficult to bear.

My director has just phoned from Angola. She tells me she’s finished shooting the final scenes of my forthcoming movie and we can go into editing next month. Our working title is The Passion of Alphonso. Alphonso is a wealthy Luandan playboy and arms dealer living off his father’s money (he was a flunkey for pre-independence Portuguese colonialists). He is Africa’s largest exporter of sex-slaves and importer of hard drugs. He financed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA for thirty years and oversaw (with the help of South African mercenaries who later fled to earn dollars in Iraq) the obliteration of Cuito, Huambo and several million Angolans. Responsible for withholding AIDS medicines from the poor to speed sales of Afghan heroin shipped by USAid, he has developed a conscience. Realising the magnitude of his crimes, he now sweats blood every night, uses industrial-strength coke to burn holes through his septum, and suffers from a terrible conscience.

Gunned down during a bar brawl with one of his capos at the movie's close (a bloody and explicit three-hour segment), he is a holy man indeed. I thought of blaming his death on the Portuguese, but the pre-publicity tells us the idea’s not taking off. Why? God knows. We therefore don’t expect the movie to make much money but, what the hell, we can always flog it to the Nigerians. They are good Christian folk. And Moslems too.

The Armchair Admiral

Thomas P.M. Barnett: A War-to-War Salesman....

...selling globalization on the appall-ment plan

One for the Doc: First posted March 12, 2003

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point-the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

Thomas P.M. Barnett [Rentboy Third Class, Naval War College, Newport, RI]


Admiral Thomas P.M. Barnett's new board game [safe for kids younger than three]. Cut out the dark areas and 'shrink the Gap'

Now that the latest scourge of all that is fine, decent, and upstanding has crawled out from under its rock to sell war to the masses, what is the American left going to do to rein in the sick and depraved bastards running the U.S. and the globe into a black hole the size of George W. Bush's hollow skull? Huh? Of all the low-down, cheap-jack, bottom-feeding scum suckers I've read touting wall-to-wall war for couch potatoes and the Bush administration, 'Professor' Thomas P.M. 'Pom-Pom' Barnett takes the cake.

This abysmal excuse for a military strategist and oil-baron apologist is not only of The Project for the New American Century crank-tank school of hosers and fucknozzles. He has taken to pornography as well. He now flaunts his weaponry and the U.S.' diabolical plans for world domination across several pages of the March issue of Esquire.

Being a good Catholic boy and happily married to boot, I do not buy Esquire. Nor do I feel any need to get my rocks off watching free-lance military hacks like Pom-Pom selling the world on their missiles or technique. Nor do I buy into anything put out on the disgusting Council on Foreign Relations site, another gutter-level propagator of propaganda for the Jesus Bunker heel heads.

My acquaintance with Pom-Pom [or Tom the Gong as he is now known in the gentlemen's clubs] is Dimitri's fault. He pointed me to the Esquire article and I thank him for doing so. Although it is always pleasing to have one's bizarre theories corroborated by those in the know, my satisfaction felt after reading Barnett's drivel, all neatly wrapped in a brown-paper headline, The Pentagon's New Map, derives from having spent the evening laughing at Professor Barnacle's paucity of gray matter.

His thesis has to be one of the most flawed policy documents to come out of The War Room. All it tells us, with the subtlety of Las Vegas and despite Captain Courageous's assertion that Saddam is a 'cutthroat Stalinist' running a historical dictatorship at the 'crossroads of civilizations', is that the United States has become the Soviet Union [circa 1950]. This tawdry piece of fourth-grade prose posing as a policy briefing full of contradictions is nothing more than an ultimatum to 'homogenize or atomize'.

Barnett synthesizes the lot in one sentence. A country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. Nice, eh? As far as the boys in the Jesus Bunker are concerned, it's 'globalize or bust'. And by 'bust', they're not referring to models posing for Esquire. They're talking KABOOM!

Listen to this:

Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not. Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and-most important-the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization's "ozone hole" may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military's next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

Deciphering the type of bullshit that mutates 'mass slaughter of innocents' to 'away games', we can ascertain that Captain Barfly posits an aggressive, military 'shrinking' of the Gap he so vividly sees and, indeed, maps for us [see beta of store game above]. For what is a military strategist without his maps?

What scares me is Barnett's assumptions about Africa:

Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core's public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict.

Why is it that the U.S.' idea of 'security' generally leaves non-U.S. citizens sweating profusely, feeling nauseous, gnawing at their clothes, and exhibiting most of the symptoms of advanced malaria?

Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

Nothing but catch-phrases and soundbites, I tell you. How's this for one. Barnett defines the realization post 9-11 that the United States' military can be brought to its knees by anyone with a good idea, a 'system perturbation'. I like it. He's inventive if nothing else. And for this, The Pentagon's New Map must be commended.

Just who is this Thomas P.M. Barnett punk anyway? Here's the lowdown. I took PorridgeBoy out of the cupboard, shook the mothballs from his skeleton, fed him some porridge, handed him his kilt, and sent him out to dig the dirt on the ersatz Admiral. He duly delivered on the new boy from the Jesus Bunker.

When not fulfilling his daytime duties as a failed semen and general jerk, Tom Barnett hangs around the halls of the Naval War College, smiling at undergraduates, ogling officers, and offering sexual favors for free. Being a free thinker, I do not in any way decry Thomas P.M. his behavior. His bedroom prowess and little black book have secured him a place in the anals of U.S. military history as the one policy adviser to have found himself in the right place at the right time.

"Okay, cut it now, Tom," moaned George, rolling over onto his back. "If you breathe one word of this to Big Dick, I'll have your balls roasted on a Crawford barbecue."

"Don't worry about me, Dubs, I won't say a word," said Tom, easing himself out of bed before padding off to the bathroom. "I'm very fond of the Veep and, like you, I'd hate to hurt his feelings. Besides, I owe him. He gave us the go ahead to start fucking with people's heads."

Yes, unfortunately [and disgusting as it is], the above is true. PorridgeBoy says so and I have independent confirmation direct from Tom's pimp, the editor of Esquire, David Granger.

I placed a call to Granger and told him to leg it to my office. Offering me a glimpse into Tom's knowledge of the carnal arts, Dave spoke openly of Barnett's insanity: "This is an entirely unprecedented look inside the thinking that will guide our defense strategy over the next five to ten years. It's a fantastic and challenging story. In November, Barnett came and presented his philosophy of global conflict to our staff. It was amazing and kind of breathtaking. It made each of us feel as though we had a slightly better grip on some of the most frightening issues ever to face our country and the world. I hope it has the same effect on you, making your life a little better."

"You disgusting little squirt," I screamed at him, jabbing him in the face with a straight left that bloodied his nose. "I don't need to grip anything. Don't you see what this is? Those sick fucks in the Jesus Bunker are carving up the globe as though it's the Thanksgiving turkey. They're taking over. Millions will die and billions will be affected. They're power crazy, hopped up on drugs, and totally deranged. They have to be stopped. Perle, Wolfowitz, Rummey, Woolsey, Gaffney, McCain, Snowcroft, Feith, the lot... We should be pounding the streets of DC right now, recruiting suicide bombers and vestal virgins."

"Don't they get the vestal virgins after they've blown themselves up?" mumbled Granger through his bloodied kerchief.

"Not for them, you snide little purveyor of filth," I roared. "For us. Recruiting suicides is dangerous and tiring work. Get your coat. We have work to do."

A thought struck me. "By the way, Granger, who came up with the headline, The Pentagon's New Map?"

"Eh, I dunno." He shrugged. "The Professor, I s'pose. He was very particular about it."

I doubted it. I could tell the mark of a professional. Just as The Emperor's New Clothes have been shown to be even less than those he usually wears ["Fuckit, Laura, get out! I'm nekkid."], the Pentagon's New Map shows the hallmark of a bubble brain. But the skin-pic editor was blind to that which stared him in the face. I could see right away Granger had been suckered by the toy boy from the War College. He shifted his feet and looked at the floor. "He's not that bad, you know. As he says, '...military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.'"

I was losing my temper. Lowering my voice, I set the thermostat to freezing. "David, this guy would see 21,000-pound MOABs dropped on Baghdad. He quotes an anonymous Roman at the foot of his home page. A slave who has more than one master is a free man. Believe that and you'll believe anything. He wrote a paper with a couple of out-of-work strategy whores for the U.S. Naval Institute entitled The American Way of War. Among many other sick and abusive things, when speaking of 'the inevitability of American warfare', he emphasizes the need to 'maintain a capacity to reverse significant acts of aggression within a security system we seek to administer like an empire.' Now if that language doesn't strike you as weird or twisted in any way, I'd say staring at all these women without doing anything about it has turned your brain to semen."

"Have one on me," offered Granger, trying to slide out from under his civic duty. Looking at the menu, I was tempted but had to turn the sly toad down, reiterating my marital status and Catholicity. Granger mistakenly saw my willingness to uncover my staunch conservatism as a gap. He took it. "Look Mike, Barnett has annotated the world. More specifically, the world's hot spots and the likelihood of war in each of those places. For the first time, someone with a position in the government explains what we're really undertaking when we go to war in Iraq. It's not just about disarmament. Rather, the United States is redrawing the map of the region, we are shrinking the Gap [to use Barnett's term], we are changing the course of history by adopting a good-offense-is-the-best-defense strategy."

"David," I replied, trying not to give him a short, sharp smack across his balding pate, "I don't give a fuck. Literally and figuratively. It's dangerous and it's wrong. And, given his behavior, I doubt Barnett's shrinking any gaps. If anything, he's turning them into Grand Canyons. The President and Veep can hardly walk. Look, this diseased little rentboy is no good for you or your magazine. He'll tear you apart like a space shuttle. Don't trust him."

Dave's chromed dome flushed red with anger, his spectacles fogged and he demanded, "Why not? He's quite attractive - for a strategist."

"Read my blog, you putrescent little porn freak. His so-called NewRuleSets.Project is nothing of the sort. I've known what Big Dick's been up to for years and I've blogged the lot. He's not only every admiral's last resort as a bumboy, he's a plagiarist to boot."

"My God, you can't be serious?" Dave Granger is, if anything, a publisher and a professional. I knew he'd be surprised.

"Nah, fuck it, read my stuff. I know all about the Ring of Steel and George's instructions to wipe Asia and Africa. Look at my blog entry below. It's nothing new. Read Wayne Madsen's January article Big Oil and James Baker Target Western Sahara. Read Larry Chin's articles on the Philippines and the NSC-68 school's plans for Iraq. Haven't you heard of Blogger? Cluetrain? RageBoy, Doc, Doctor Weimeraner and the boys? They'd market this thing very differently."


Cut along dotted line and burn Africa for a clear idea of the Project for the New American Century's interim vision of the Eastern World with shrunken Gap

Granger's face was as blank as Dubya's brain and about as white as his KKK sheet.

"David, listen to me. Do not take this man seriously. Thomas P.M. Barnett has a couple of Web sites. Jeez, are you dumb or what? Going by what they have in there already, anybody could fill the Cabinet's minds with absolute crap. Even I have a couple of Web sites. Mine is hosted by Blogger and his is on GeoCities for Chrissakes. He calls himself an adviser to the Secretary of Defense, he's the Director of this dumb NewRuleSets.Project, he sleeps his way into the Decision Strategies Department at the Naval War College, and you take him seriously?"

I smacked his head.

"Ouch! Don't do that."

"Shut up, you fool." I was becoming impatient. "Look at the write up you gave the little nonce in your December Best and Brightest issue. A military strategist? The boy plays with himself in the bath. You call that military strategy?" I smacked him again. And again for good measure. And once for luck. "He's a flunky, you fool. He was head of the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project. Good grief, man, he was a cheap spook. He spied on FEMA. That's all there is to it. Today, he's still a spook and an errand boy. You write him up as the brains behind every think tank pushing this vile national agenda of yours. What's this crap? 'Shortly after we wrote about military strategist Thomas Barnett in last December's Best and Brightest issue, he gave the Esquire staff a presentation on his theory of war and globalization, just as he regularly does for government leaders as an adviser to the Department of Defense. We'll never read the news the same way again.' Good God, Granger, he's a nobody. He's Big Dick's runabout."

David was cowering on the floor. "What do you want me to do?" he whined.

"Pull the lot," I said abruptly. "Pull the lot, publish a retraction, and credit me with the plan. Keep the maps though."

"Why?"

"We want the world and America to know what the GOP has in store for them. Tell them I blogged it first. Screw Iraq. This is much bigger than Saddam and some Kurds being massacred by Turks while everybody fights over the northern oilfields. These buggers want to go to war with the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. Rentboy says as much. What's worse, and this is where he strings himself from a streetlight, he assures us that Israel is a fully functioning model of globalization adrift in a sea of insanity."

"Well, aren't they?" asked Granger timidly.

I seldom lose my temper but I came close to it. "You blithering, blathering twit. You ignorant fucking pipsqueak. Have you not heard of the DSM-IV? Sharon and his jackboots are sicker than a pack of rabid hyenas on steroids. Fuck me every which way but upside down." I gave Granger a vicious shove as he advanced. "I meant that metaphorically, you twisted little pervert," I snarled. "You know the whole Carlyle Group, Carlucci, James Baker, John Major, Bin Laden and Bush saga, eh?" I asked him.

"Yep, I've been following you," answered Granger. "The plans for nuking Afghanistan being laid out for Clinton by Wolfowitz and Perle and sat on by Bush, the whole Project for the New American Century thing, the whores of the Caspian Basin recruited from the MIC, Zbigniew Brzezinski's Clash of Civilisations Theory, and the orgies under the Lincoln Memorial. The Russian takeover, the BP oil deal, and the nobbling of Argentina. I've been reading you, I swear."


Cut along dotted line and burn Africa and South America for a clear idea of the Project for the New American Century's vision of the Western World with shrunken Gap and the United States and Europe secured for eternity. Surrounded by water and isolated forever

It appeared Granger had been keeping up to date. Nobody else writes such rubbish. But I enjoy it. "Barnett's the PR boy for the meat sheets. Listen to this":

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you a strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

"This is the stuff of empire and nothing less, David," I said giving him a hearty smack for the hell of it. "The bozos in the Bunker have been starved of oxygen. They think this shit is new. Every Roman with a wreath around his head said the same thing for centuries. And we all know what happened to them. Sure, succeeding emperors had their differences but their agenda was the same. And this stuff goes back a long way in the States. D'ya really think all that shit around 9-11 is conspiracy?"

"Well..."

SMACK. It sounded like a rifle shot. Granger fell to the floor and I kicked him in his ribs. "Get up, you little sot," I spat at him. "You know all about the FEMA transfers and their visit to the towers the day before. You know... I phoned you as soon as it happened."

"Yeah, I remember..." Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and he breathed with difficulty. "The fact that they knew..."

"Of course they knew." I felt like kicking him while he was down but hesitated. I'd need him later. "Listen David, Barnett knew FEMA inside out. He knew what was going down 9-11 because he'd worked with them on the Y2K issue."

"Whaddaya mean...?" I was losing him.

"Check out his NewRuleSets.Project Web site at the War College. It says here 'The NewRuleSets.Project began in the spring of 2000 as a multi-year, five workshop effort designed to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes redefine the U.S. Military's historic role as "security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the world."

"So?"

"Check out the logo, you fool. You're supposed to be the journalist. It depicts the Twin Towers. This is the interesting bit. 'The project was hosted by the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which participated in the design of the three workshops held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World conference facility [May 2000, October 2000, June 2001]. That particular workshop series ended with the tragedy of 9/11, as did Cantor's participation in the research."

Granger looked dumbfounded.

"Jesus, Granger, if you don't get your head into gear, I'll set PorridgeBoy onto you. Bin Laden, cut out of the Carlyle deal, threatened with the Taliban by the administration on Unocal's behalf, effected a pre-emptive strike against the enemy. What was the best target and who was worst hit?"

"Cantor Fitzgerald? Lutnick, the guy who cancelled his employee's paychecks? The World Trade Center? Who?"

"Both. All of them, you idiot. Cantor Fitzgerald lost more employees than any other company in the World Trade Center attacks. Up on floors 101 and 103-105, they accounted for a quarter of the total. As for the people who served them their meals in the Windows on the World restaurant... hmm. And why? I'll tell you why. It's because our boys in the Jesus Bunker want to rule the world. Some payback, eh? What do you think the average Cantor Fitzgerald employee knew of what was going down? What did Lutnick know? It probably doesn't matter. The system's rotten to the core. What's more, with Barrow Boy Barnett on the loose, we can look forward to far worse."

"Are you sure?"

"Christ, Granger, you're supposed to be a journalist. He's behind this shit. He gave you the headline for the dumb article. We've been yabbering about this stuff on the blogs for well over a year now. Now that some microbe is set loose from the Jesus Bunker to infect us with their thought processes, which verify all our worst nightmares, you suddenly start doubting it?"

"No, no, I don't, I promise. What do you want me to write?"

Hell, if there's one thing I really appreciate, it's a free press. I scribbled some copy and let Granger go. It has to do with Pom-Pom Barnett's role in the bombing of the World Trade Center. It'll run in Esquire next month. We have to balance the books somewhat, eh? What irks me about the admiral is not that he believes his own propaganda. That's normal. What hacks me off is the way he loses himself in the density of his own rhetoric. Pointing out that state-on-state wars are passé, Barnett emphasizes the need for the U.S. military to scale itself to match its foe. He then tells us it will be business as usual.

It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn. I know most Americans do not want to hear this, but the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there. If gated communities and rent-a-cops were enough, September 11 never would have happened.

Yeah, Bubba. So does that mean Americans can reclaim their civil rights? Heh... Sure.

Scalability is well and good but, in The American Way of War, he tells us why half the United States is camped on Saddam's doorstep. Following a hollow attempt to circumscribe a new jargon, viz. "Network-centric warfare combines the four military branches into a seamless, joint warfighting force...", he describes the speed with which the U.S. armed forces respond to crises:

The decision to go to war must never be quick, but a defining characteristic of the American Way of War is the growing ability of U.S. forces to execute operations with unprecedented speed. This is not so much speed of response as speed within the response. In other words, we may choose our punches with great care [strategy], only to unleash them with blinding speed [operations, tactics]. Most of this speed comes from increased battlespace transparency, although the speed of platforms remains crucial to protecting our personnel.

U.S. operations increasingly resemble hockey superstar Wayne Gretsky's "speed" on the ice. Never the fastest skater, Gretsky concentrated less on skating to where the puck was and more on skating to where the puck would be. The goal of the common operational picture within network-centric warfare speaks to this sort of speed: not trying to be everywhere all the time, but to be exactly where you need to be exactly when you need to be there.

What unmitigated crap. Have you ever seen anything as useless, unwieldy, and inefficient as the U.S. military? Me neither. But then perhaps we're not taking our Captain Without A Command seriously enough. Foreseeing the need to loosen up the military, he advises "Forward presence therefore will be valued more than strategic deployment from home, necessitating a major force posture shift from the current condition where 80%-plus of the force is U.S. based."

I'm telling you, that last statement scares me witless. Coming from a man without a conscience, soul, or shred of intelligence, it tells me the never-ending war is here.

Disconnectedness defines danger.

Yeah. The Admiral has a way of using succinct phrases liable to bounce back at him. Thomas P.M. Barnett has disconnected to such a degree we stand little chance of surviving him or his puppeteers. For a truly frightening contradiction of everything you've come to expect from the Bush administration, read Barnett and Gaffney's The Top 100 Rules of the New American Way of War, to be published in the next issue of British Army Review.

"GRANGER!"

"Eh?"

"Get in here. I need to smash something..."

"Screw you. Tear up the maps and conquer the world."

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. Edmund Burke