Decline and Fall

Treading Water

My throat is burning; a solid week of abuse is taking it's toll, as the sandpaper feeling at the back of my mouth reminds me of every cigarette and coffee I've had, and every whiskey and stout I've poured into my bloodstream.  I'd be lying if I said I hadn't taken the occasional mother's little helper, too.  Occasionally I puncture the tedium of this chemical ingestion with a bout of self-pity and panic.  Every morning I oversleep, unanxious to deal with my last days at work.  I trudge through the cold, clutching my Barbour tight to my body, and enjoy the first American Spirit of the day, and when I get to my office, read through the classified ads.  Depression?  No.  Just numbness.

Watch Out for the Man

Ich bin kaput.

I returned from Peru on Monday, and by Wednesday, I was let go from my job.  I'd be lying if I said I was completely heartbroken, but still, the news didn't exactly brighten my day.

The office is being quite nice about it.  They're going to let me continue here while I look for a new job so that I can draw a salary and pretend to be still employed for the sake of my resume.  I'm not sure how long that's going to last, though, and I have to make a few belt-tightening measures: canceling cable and internet service, and trying to talk my leasing company into letting me move into a studio from my one bedroom that I currently live in.

I don't really know what this means, or what comes next.  I don't think that I'm really cut out for the corporate law world, and am looking at going back into academia, or maybe a think-tank.  But if we're being honest, I'm pretty much scared shitless about what I'm going to do with my life now.

An Exercise in Narcissm: A Self-Interview in the Fashion of William F. Buckley, Jr.

Why do you blog?  Aside from as an exercise in irrelevance? Probably out of equal parts boredom and a desire to improve my writing.

What are you reading at the moment?  Stephen Fry's Revenge, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, and William Hague's biography of Pitt the Younger.

Who are your cultural heroes?  Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, and William Hazlitt.

What is your favorite poem?  It's a toss up between Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

What is your favorite movie?  Lawrence of Arabia.

What is your favorite song?  At this moment, probably "Judy and the Dream of Horses" by Belle and Sebastian.

What philosphical thesis do you find it most important to disseminate?  Anything relating to anti-totalitarianism.

What philosophical thesis do you think it is most important to combat?  Various and sundry forms of relativism.

Who are your political heroes?  Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be?  Having senators serve life-time terms.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? Moral relativism.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come?  I think Victorian England was probably the apex.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? Don't take everything so seriously. 

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own?  Yes.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be President, who would you choose?  I think anyone who could do the job well would turn it down.

Who would play you in the movie about your life?  William Holden.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be?  Churchill, Leo Struass, and Benjamin D'Israeli.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? I'd like an isolated cabin in Northern Michigan on the shores of a trout-filled river with plenty of good hiking nearby.

What would your ideal holiday be?  London at winter, staying at Brown's St. George's Hotel.

What do you consider the most important personal quality?  Courage and good sportsmanship.

What personal fault do you most dislike? Hypocracy.

What, if anything, do you worry about? Growing old alone.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? To help someone or an ideal I love.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? I'm not to big on zealots -- political or religious -- of any stripe.

What is your favourite proverb?  This too shall pass.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time?  Watching professional sports (although this is changing), "clubbing," and smoking pot.  It's not that I'm opposed to drugs, but if you're going to do them, do something that gives you a real high -- not something that makes you listen to bad jam bands and fall asleep.

What animal would you most like to be? A housecat.

What do you like doing in your spare time?  Reading, watching old movies, playing board games, listening to music, and napping.

What is your most treasured possession?  My boxing passbook.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? Philip.

What talent would you most like to have? I'd like to be a better writer.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? Polar explorer or soldier.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist?  P.G. Wodehouse.

Who are your sporting heroes? Sugar Ray Robinson and Roger Bannistar.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? I'd eat better, drive a Bentley, and start collecting Old Masters paintings and rare books.

Lifetime Piling Up

In less than forty-eight hours I'll be on a plane bound for Miami.  From there I'll transfer to smaller plane bound for Lima, Peru, after which I will fly in a yet-smaller plane to Cuzco, Peru.  Counting layovers, I'm looking at about sixteen hours of travel.  While I love traveling, as in going places, I hate traveling, as in getting to those places.  Flying absolutely terrifies me.  The prospect of three hours on a two engine, ten seat, propeller driven vehicle makes me more than a bit uncomfortable.  Nonetheless, I'm well armed for my journey: an iPod filled with opera and indie rock, a couple tabs of Valium, a flask full of whiskey, ear plugs, crossword puzzles, and a backpack full of books.

I'm looking forward to my stay in Peru.  My time will be divided between my hotel -- a luxuriously renovated sixteenth century monastery -- and the Inca trail leading to the ruins of Macchu Picchu.  I'll follow that up with a few days of fly fishing in various small streams running through the Andes.

Until I depart, though, things are going to be a bit chaotic.  I'm sparring a few rounds tonight and hoping to catch the Sox game.  I've also got two filings due in court tomorrow, and sometime between all this I need to pack, get a haircut, and learn to use my new camera.  Like the song says, every plan is a prayer to Father Time.

Because Someone Has to Nip the Cultural Revolution in the Bud

This past Sunday, Nicholas Kristof had a review in the New York Times of a new book on Mao Tse-Tung.  Kristof gets on my nerves less than the other second-hand sophists at the Gray Lady, but his musings this weekend really went too far.  My response is up at the New Criterion's website (scroll to the bottom).

As a side note, not many people in the mid-west, or among the younger generation, read The New Criterion.  This is a shame.  I don't know of a more erudite and incisive journal that covers as wide a variety of cultural topics as it does -- theatre, art, music, books, politics, and so forth.  It's definitely worth checking out.

Manderlay

I generally don't have much patience with anti-American sentiment.  There just doesn't seem to be a justification for it.  Foreigners may dislike the current government, but only a very, very slim majority of the population voted it in.  The Middle East may detest our foreign policy, but we were one of the only nations in the world to help Muslims when they were being slaughtered in the Balkans.  Mass consumerism may turn people off, but then again, corporations wouldn't exist if societies didn't need or want their products.  And, more generally speaking, I'm not a fan of any movement or "ism" which uses a wide brush to paint pictures which would be better done in detail.  Now that I've established my credentials -- everything I've said thus far I mean with the utmost sincerety -- I want to praise the newest movie of Lars Von Trier, often called, with justification, one of the most anti-American directors working today.

Evan and I went to see Von Trier's newest film, Manderlay, last night at the Chicago International Film Festival.  It was, quite simply, the best film I've seen this year.  The plot is deceptively simple: A young woman comes across a plantation where, in 1930, slavery still exists.  Using her mob-boss father's minions, she forcibly liberates the slaves and attempts to teach them how to work as a functioning, democratic community (Interestingly, this film was written and produced long before the invasion of Iraq, a fact some critics seem to skip over).  As in most Von Trier films, no good deed goes unpunished, and things never go as planned.

The film has two targets that I can see, and I admit that my interpretation may not be the correct one.  The first target is the racist legacy of America.  Aside from paleo-conservatives, most intelligent people would never deny this fact.  But Von Trier does not deal with this issue in a normal fashion -- in fact very little dialogue at all is spent on pre-Civil War society.  Rather, he focuses how, in spite of slavery's abolition, American society was still unwilling to accept black people as equal citizens.  And I think that he's right here -- America's most shameful legacy isn't slavery, but rather the period of discrimination immediately following it and continuing up until today.  At least slavery, when it existed, had the imprimateur of law behind it.  But following the Civil War Amendments, discrimination was not only morally wrong -- as it always had been -- but also legally wrong, and America's great shame is not using the courts before Brown v. Board of Education to redress these grievances.  And it was this period that saw the rise of the KKK, mass lynchings, Jim Crow laws, unconscionable contracts, and so forth.  I think one can make a legitimate argument that life was more difficult as a minority in the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.  This is by no means said in defense of slavery, but rather in condemnation of our only half-hearted efforts to ameliorate its damages.

Yet Von Trier's other target is the condescension liberal white guilt, represented by the main character who presumes that she knows what is best for the slaves.  As most of you know my political opinions, you won't be surprised that I agree with this.  The fatal conceit of all plans is a confidence which precludes questioning one's own premises.  Such surety of one's self is despicable and dangerous, whether it comes from George Bush or Michael Moore.  The world is complex and absurd; to think that any single one of us understands it and can fix its problems, without doing any wrong, is patently ridiculous.  Solutions to difficulties, real difficulties, are messy, and usually have to be rethought at least a few times.  I can't say how Von Trier deals with this idea without giving away major parts of the film, but suffice to say, his indictment is scathing.

In many senses, Von Trier isn't anti-American -- he's anti-humanity.  So while Manderlay is definitely not the feel-good hit of the fall, it's still worth seeing.

Bloody Lips and Bruises

A number of writers, much better versed than myself on the subject, suggest that one take a day of rest for every mile run in a long distance race. According to this advice, I should avoid strenuous exercise until roughly mid-November in order to let myself recover from the Chicago Marathon. But I'm loathe to trust "experts." It wasn't that long ago that authors of esteemed medical textbooks suggested bleeding people to cure headaches, and not in the too distant past that music critics gave Hootie and the Blowfish a Grammy for best new band.

So I eschewed the advice of the experts, and went to the boxing gym last night.

The damage isn't that bad -- a split lip, an aching Achilles's tendon, and various and sundry bruises on my ribs. The old nose is a bit sensitive to the touch, too. I have to say, however, that being back in the ring made me realize how much I love the sport, and how much more alive I feel with a pair of fourteen ounce gloves firmly encasing my fists.

It's hard to describe what makes one love a sport like boxing, where it is guaranteed that both participants will both dole out and take in serious amounts of pain in the course of a few two-minute rounds. I was trying to explain this to Katie the other night, and found myself at a loss for words. Now that I've had a few days to think it over, though, I'm going to give it another try.

The first thing to keep in mind is how little most of the commentators actually know about the sport. Joyce Carol Oates, who I'm quite sure has never set foot within the twenty by twenty confines of a ring, attempts to read male aggression into the sport and views it as a paradigm for larger issues in society. Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway tried to infuse the sport with some sense of self-proving necessary to achieve manhood. I think that all three of these writers, when it comes to boxing, at least, don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about. Even putting aside the fact that the prevalence of modern-day women boxers bely the arguments about masculinity, what the aforementioned authors miss out is that at the end of the day, a match is just a fight. Sure, it's got a few rules and regulations, but ultimately, it's just two guys in an enclosed area trying to hurt each other.

Even that last sentence of mine is a bit misleading. Boxers don't necessarilly get joy from hurting each other. Any of us worth our salt has enough confidence in our fighting ability that we don't need to prove it to anyone. I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that boxers get into less fights than the average human being -- after all, if you know that you can beat someone up, it's a lot easier to walk away from a fight without losing any pride.

So boxing isn't about the infliction of pain; in all honesty, I think it's about the contrary. A fight, between two good boxers, is about the absortion and enduring of pain -- it's a confessional on canvas, where one can confess all sins, real and imagined, to the catharsis of a right cross or hook to the body. Martin Scorcese and George Plimpton understood this. No matter how much you wrong yourself or others, once you step inside the ring, you know that you will serve penance of some sort. It's a quasi-religious feeling, and I think that this idea goes a lot toward explaining why most boxers feel their calmest while fighting. I admit, it's a fucked up way to deal with things. But then again, so are most institutions and rites which offer any sort of meaningful forgiveness.