Notes from Bushwick
It's occurred to me that we have yet to make use of what we now have in terms of communication collateral. Google Docs, for instance, opens up all sorts of possibilities with regards to collaboration insomuch as that one can share a text document with an unlimited number of people, all of whom can contribute to it without any real hassle. This opens up a number of possibilities - and if we do not take advantage of them first, then someone else will.
I'm going to start a new Google Doc to which any of our readers may contribute by sending me an e-mail and having me provide them with the ability to edit. The doc will start with a paragraph of prose, and contributors will take turns adding in additional paragraphs. The result would be a collaborative short story composed by various Bushwick residents - unless no one is interested in doing this, in which case fuck all of you.
Here's the opening paragraph, then:
***
Thomas had not left the little room he rented for three days, other than to use the bathroom which itself was thankfully three feet from his own door, and which could thus be accessed without him having to catch the eye of any of his roommates. Both of them despised him, or at least he gathered that this was the case, as he had lost his job soon after having responded to a craigslist ad and moving in, and his scattered attempts to generate income with which to pay his share had all failed. He now owed a portion of the previous month's rent and all of this month's, which is to say that even if he were to get some crappy job tomorrow, he would still be in the process of catching up for perhaps three or four weeks, after which he would be working towards paying for the month after that. And then there would be internet, gas, electric... when one is in debt of that sort - and to people with whom one lives and thus cannot hope to avoid - it is a terrible thing to have only the slowest trickle of income; one is an indentured servant in such a case. Thomas' only real pleasure at this point was found between lying down and falling asleep, during which time he would come up with all manner of scenarios in which he, the protagonist, was possessed of extreme degrees of security. He imagined himself to be a character in 1984, and had even invented a little job for himself: he would work as a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth, assisting in certain lesser tasks in the production of a propaganda magazine for children. He would imagine himself further to be very dedicated to Big Brother, and when the Thought Police watched him through the telescreen, they would always note him to be happy and otherwise not a person of interest. Of course, his apartment would be paid for by the state, and there would be no question of debt. Beyond that more obvious instance of wish fulfillment, though, he found an overall neurotic satisfaction in picturing himself under the control of some omniscient state, one which would always be watching him for signs of rebellion but would always find a model citizen instead. This fantasy grew in complexity as time went by until such time as he had worked out exactly what tasks his character would perform at work, how he would be regarded by his superiors, to what extent he would drink Victory Gin (very little, he decided, and usually in celebration of some military victory), and other such details. But he could only indulge in this fantasy for so long each day, having some energy despite his unsteady eating habits, and so he would pace around his room for portions of the afternoons, spending the rest of his time on the internet, compulsively reading message boards on the subject of Japanese role playing games. When he was able to face the situation as a whole, he could only determine that there was no way by which to revive himself, even though only six months earlier he had lived life to its fullest or at the 21st century equivalent thereof. If there was a way out, it would have to be on the internet as well, as he hated the cold, and the prospect of applying for a job - asking for a manager, filling out an application that would require information on previous employers from the state in which he'd grown up, as the most recent one was out of the question as a reference... he would have to take the application back home and look up the address of that old convenience store, for instance, and then walk back to whatever place he had gotten it from in order to turn it in, and he knew that his demeanor would be so unimpressive, that he would mumble nervously in response to any and all questions, that upon turning in the application he would encounter some strange look or a disingenuous, "Okay, I'll give this to the manager, thank you," which would translate to, "There's something off about you, so, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and just throw this away as soon as you're out the door." There was no point in doing any of this. If there existed some means by which to regain his life, it would have to be on the internet. Even then, he would first have to conjure up a manic phase; the depressive cycle had not stopped this time, but had simply stretched on and on for months. Mania was his only chance. He would have to talk to himself again, perhaps, as he recalled this working in the past. But now, one of his roommates was knocking on the door; it was the asshole roommate and not, of course, the non-entity roommate, who would never go so far as to knock on a door.
***
If you're interested in contributing to the experimental format of the collaborative short story, e-mail me at
barriticus@gmail.com or leave your e-mail address in the comments section, and I'll add you to the view/edit list on the document.
Notes from the Outside World
I finally finished
my second book last week; it's set for release in March, as my publisher has an unusually quick turnaround time. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, whom I've determined to possess the worst mediocrity-to-respectability ratio of any major American pundit:
These things being relative, Charles Krauthamer is today considered - rightfully - to be among the Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets. In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate him. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.
Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they are as likely to turn to our chapter subject as to anyone else. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:
I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence in the arena of foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is actually the case.
In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that begun thusly:
On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of his little Kosovo war.
Our columnist seems to have since changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that no such thing as genocide is actually taking place. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer asserts that NATO intervention thus far has failed to prevent "savage ethnic cleansing, executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than 100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that some sort of genocide is taking place.
Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clark's answer, in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that - which, of course, it did.
Even after Clinton's "little Kosovo war" proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that "the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late 2009, Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.